Nature's Laws

[TheRealJoeFish]

I don't claim to have the ability to comprehend what it might be like to "know nothing about it."  I can, therefore, only respond to the "knows something" state of affairs.  If nature builds machines, my ability to (slightly) understand the concept of teleonomy tends to make me ask, where does this plan, purpose, and know-how come from? 

Well, on the most basic level, the plan/purpose is a result of how atoms fit together.  That dictates which molecules can form.  That, plus all the forces in the universe, dictated which molecules did form, and in what places, and with what energy.  Then these molecules fit together according to the rules. Turns out, the rules made some fittings-together more common or likely. These happened a bunch of times. And, some of the rules made it so that once one molecule happens, it makes more of them happen. Sometimes, two molecules aren't necessarily self-inducing, but when they got together and formed a bigger molecule, they were. And so on. That's a really basic conception, belying my absolute ignorance on the technical aspects of biogenesis, but there you go.

I'm just taking note of the well observed fact that machines always seem to require a planner who has a purpose.

This is just definitions. We've got to tighten up our meanings here. Most definitions of machine assume not a creation by an intelligence but a use by an intelligence. Is a hill a machine? No, unless someone rolls barrels down its length to get them to a loading station. You can't say, "it is observed that every machine has a planner," define something that we don't know to have been planned as a "machine," and then bootstrap the existence of a planner. It's nonsense.