You're still not getting it. "Entity", "survival", these are still arbitrary or circularly defined terms. You decided what an entity is (i.e where one thing ends and a different thing begins) and what the essence which "survives" is (i.e. why it's a big deal whether there's a different chunk of nucleic acids similar but not identical to my own floating around 200 years from now).
These ideas are not wrong, but they are teleological. They are about the purpose of things. And nature doesn't come with purposes, it's all something we impose on it.
> And nature doesn't come with purposes, it's all something we impose on it.
That is the presumption others are calling you out for. Things very clearly act appear to act with purpose, they just clearly don't provide it for themselves. You are presuming one solution to the problem (that appearance does not hold in reality), but there is another one.
A storm can appear to act with purpose too, or a planet orbiting a star, yet I doubt you assign it agency. It's fundamentally your choice to assign something agency or not, whether you are right or wrong to do so, is not an empirical question. It is a teleological one. "Call me out" all you want, this is very basic.
I kinda agree that the financial system is intelligent in the problem solving sense but disagree that it is pursuing a particular goal in the sense that institutions and organisations are.
It's more akin to an ecosystem to me. In nature we also have ecosystems organising and reusing resources but I would only ascribe intelligence to living organisms pursuing individual goals with agency.
Haven't thought too hard about the distinction though so happy to be shown a better principle.
What’s the primary goal of any for profit business? To survive for eternity - going concern in perpetuity that is hopefully very valuable.