Comment by Mikhail_Edoshin

Yes, everything is built for a purpose. But the raw materials used to make a thing do not change because of the purpose. They follow their own laws, it's us who ascribe the meaning to the resulting combination. Laws are something we cannot change, only use. But purpose is a concept. We do need concepts to create and operate things, but if we shouldn't mistake them for laws. Concepts are something much more pliable :)

It's all rather abstract, I guess, but yesterday I found an example while playing a game, "Opus Magnum". You are to solve puzzles by arranging mechanical arms to move marbles. Initially I mentally referred to actions of the arms as "taking a marble" and "placing a marble" and solved quite a few puzzles this way. In all solutions all my arms did exactly that: they took and placed marbles without doing any purposeless movements.

Yet yesterday the next puzzle looked too tiresome to built. I had an eureka moment once I realized that the arms do not take and place marbles, they merely close and open their grips and if there's a marble, it gets caught, but the arms themselves have no idea whether they're moving a marble or not. And once I allowed myself to let them do "purposeless" movements without marbles, I found a simple and elegant solution :)