Why Why?

[Neo-Scholastic]

To the OP: some of us are intensely curious..."Know thyself"..."Man by nature wants to know"...etc.

Does that always have to include a purpose though, in your view or just generally if different? Ie in terms of Aristotle's causes, does a Final Cause always mean a purpose? There are many words for it... the end of something, the good of something, maybe goal... and for a lot of things, that sort of explanation makes sense... but not everything, IMO at least, so that seems to me the most problematic of those four causes on account of that. For instance I'm no geologist, so forgive any factual errors here, but a beach for instance is IMO an effect of erosion, but not the goal of it... so in one sense in can be said to be an end, but not in the sense of a purpose.

I think of final causes as range of possible outcomes rather than a single goal. So really, it could be thought of as a disposition towards a limited set of future states. An acorn can become an oak tree in many different ways, depending on circumstances. It could also never sprout but it will never become a maple tree no matter where you plant it or how much you water it.