Or more broadly “sentient decisions”, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue the same way, nor does it likely have any significant meaning given the constrained action and decision/personality space of animals.
People often say that they hope something will work – not someone, but something. Such a comment disregards every physical understanding, such as maintenance of position, atomic energies, and so forth. An object will happen to be in place whether you hope it or not. An antibiotic will kill whatever targeted organisms it is effective against (but whether those organisms are there, or whether the treatment can get to the site unaffected, is another question, still in the physical realm). A effort will take whatever time it takes as adjusted by whatever obstacles prove to be in the way.
To illustrate, consider that in fact there is some telekinesis mediated by a god. Clearly this telekinesis (as distinct from secular science) is not significantly repeatable, otherwise we would have easy proof of this god’s existence. Hence, any repeatable phenomenon cannot be impacted by prayer, or hope more generally – that is a logical and mechanical contradiction.
So this hope must work only in unpredictable/unmeasurable situations. The classes of situations (metaphysical review):
- Situations where prediction accuracy in the short term is high but long-term prediction accuracy is low (e.g. the weather)
- Situations where the prediction accuracy is low but higher than a random distribution among cases.
- Seemingly random events, with few or no clear correlations.
But even this is not quite enough to justify hope, as a distinct action from not hoping or praying. If in fact (because we do not know) these preceding situations (e.g. in the case of determinism vs. free will) do not incorporate a meaningfully random component, then these situations also cannot be influenced by hope. Hence hope merely would be a personal expression intended to increase personal satisfaction/happiness.
However, as we do not have a functional and repeatable means to establish whether these above situations actually have random components, hope is not just hope, it also is the assumption of random or telekinesis-type behavior in situations where that existence reliably cannot be determined.
For random behavior, this is more less the same from a personal perspective as the unknown, but repeatable case – with the twist that the random outcome also is an unknown (but also uninfluenceable). Practically, the hope’s assumption of random underlying mechanics is much the same.
For a telekinesis-type behavior, in addition to the hypothesis of telekinesis, free will of some agents also must be assumed. Otherwise, the telekinesis clearly could be occurring, but it would not be subject to any undetermined force, hence its result would be predetermined and hence the overall concept lies in the unmeasured, but repeatable set of situations.
Therefore in hoping, the human (or sentient) initiator of the hope and either the humans as targets, or possibly a microphenomenon that cascades into something larger (like the weather over longer periods of time) are the meaningful propositions.