Replies

"The difference between a process guided by an intelligent agent and one that is not seems more than semantic to me."

I think it depends on what you mean by intelligence and where you believe that intelligence resides. And, BTW, personally, I believe that intelligence at the level we are discussing and self-consciousness are not separable. Although he is seldom read these days, Henri Bergson explored the issue we are pondering.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henri-Bergson

Any issue may be clouded by people using the same term more than one way. And it may well be that Henri Bergson's way of viewing some universal or Pantheistic type of intelligence or consciousness might not fit neatly in to the regular usage of the terms intelligence and consciousness and thus require additional explanation for those of us not familiar with his views.

But whatever terms we use to encode the essence of ideas there are certainly two distinct, common, and competing ideas about evolution where one is guided by an intelligence and the other is not. However I do not think this an exclusive dichotomy. I take what you are getting at then is that Bergson's view does not quite align with either altogether and thus needs some special care to convey where words like "intelligence" and "consciousness" need to be avoided or given a specialized meaning in his system.