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NoSuchPlace comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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Yes, at least some of the time. Evolution fits your definition and we know about that. So if you want examples of how to deduce the existence of an intelligence without knowing its goals ahead of time, you could look at the history of the discovery of evolution.
Also, Eliezer has has written an essay which answers your question, you may want to look at that.
I don't see how Eliezer's criterion of stable negentropic artifacts can tell apart people (alive) from stars (not alive) (this is my go-to counterexample to the standard definitions of life).
I think that the idea is that somethings are very specific specifications, while others aren't. For example a star isn't a particularly unlikely configuration, take a large cloud of hydrogen and you'll get a star. However a human is a very narrow target in design space: taking a pile of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen is very unlikely to get you a human.
Hence to explain stars we don't need posit the existence of a process with a lot of optimization power. However since since humans are a very unlikely configuration this suggests that the reason they exist is because of something with a lot of optimization power (that thing being evolution).
I see what you are saying, certainly humans are very unlikely to spontaneously form in space. On the other hand, humans are not at all rare on Earth and stars are very unlikely to spontaneously form there.