First Cause or First Strategy?

A question prompted by musings on strategy, such as this latest thought:

It seems necessary that in defining what we mean by "life" we recognize that all life forms need to have some learning capacity to predict and expect future events.

The initial forms had to learn to seek out energy. It's not likely that the first such forms didn't learn by happy accident that the first acceptance of energy was something that bore repeating. And when its source inevitably waned, had to have "learned" that effort had become needed to search out more or receive it from a different source.

So shouldn't we now use a definition more as follows:

Life: A self-sustaining chemical reaction (or energy system) with strategic parameters and learned expectations. (Predictive becoming redundant in that context.)

Prompting what some will see as the greatest of all heretic suppositions:

Is it possible that the universe itself is no less than a collection of infinitely short term strategic operations all acting with the most immediate of purposes that form an infinite tapestry of unintended and unpredictable longer to longest term consequences?

I made some notes as a guide to what I hoped to add later, and then decided why not just store them here in the interim and see what that action does for my creative process.

Meaning of the universe, or in the universe, or to the universe ??

The universe seems to be a vast questioning organism, strategies developed in a trial and error series, that resulted in incremental advances in the nature of new questions structuring the strategic functions as they multiply, with what we have had to label "energy" as both their material and their "fuel" (hence the hypothesized entropy of the available supply? - which may in reality be inexhaustible?).

"Cause and effect" could just as well be the metaphorical first question, first problem, first option, first strategic choice, first strategic decision leading to next question, in an exponentially expanding omni-dimensional pattern of a trial and error progression throughout all of time's metaphorical existence.

Whatever potential the universe has had for the application of natural law, that law would have developed in concert with the strategies that found them controlling - laws that concurrently gave these strategies their operational parameters.

Rather than string theory, etc., think strategic geometry. Think a constrained randomness.

Nature of universe not predetermined, not deterministic, but yet deterministically random with an unpredictable progression of incremental inevitabilities.

Or not.