International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

A seemingly purposive and specific activity in a living system.

According to G. SOMMERHOFF: "The most distinctive character of the behavior of higher organisms is its goal-directness, its apparent purposiveness. In fact, it is largely through this apparently teleological nature of their activities that living organisms betray their exceptional organization. And their position on the "scale of life" is largely determined by the degree to which they possess these characteristics" (1969, p.148).

He further adds: "Many animal activities are patently goal-directed in a way which makes it clear that we are dealing here with an objective system-property – a property, moreover, which we can assume to be compatible with the basic laws of physics and chemistry. We can assume this because we know of servo-mechanisms and automata that are capable of essentially similar types of behavior" (p.149).

Orientation toward a goal, as a manifest tendency, seems to be a result of the growing perception of the time-dimension by evermore differentiated and complex brains throughout biological evolution. The most essential aspects of this are the capacity to memorize and the ability to figure out a growing number of possible future situations.

On this topic, SOMMERHOFF states: "The ordering relations here are in time as well as in space" (p.150) and… "The central nervous system more than any other part of higher organisms is responsible for introducing teleological order into the activities of the system" (p.151).

In this same paper SOMMERHOFF introduces the concept of directive correlation which eliminates the finalist taint of the goal-directness concept.