(1/3) First of three answers...
• Telos doesn’t need to imply a long game; short small baby steps work just fine. Nothing more is required than that an agential system can sense patterns (anomalies, if you will) that are playing out, relative to it, a next threshold of complexity away.
• Those patterns already playing out in raw nature and telos referencing how agential (living) systems are able to access those patterns and exploit them. 
• First, what defines a threshold of complexity? A computation is a physical process that can be characterized as a sequence of choices defined by a set of rules. The threshold of complexity for a given computational system can be defined as the limit of those final states that are reachable by that system within the given computational rule set.
• For computational rule sets based on formal logic, we know from Gödel and Turing, that there will always be unreachable states. In other words, any computational system based on a formal rule set will always have a ceiling of complexity beyond which it cannot go.
• But there’s no reason that a computational rule set has to be based on a formal language or grammar. Call this the Gödel-Turing loophole.
• In which case, there’s no reason that a computational system (in the physics sense) can’t instantiate a rule set that allows it to probe the next level of complexity up. The only catch is that for such non-formal computational rule sets there will be no way to predict mathematically ahead of time what they can do; the only way to find out is to run them and see what happens.
• Once computation is accepted as a physical process, then there’s no reason that “curiosity” can’t also be seen to be a computational process as well. With curiosity being one of several ways to describe how an agential system will/can respond to experiencing a glitch in its matrix.