I agree, generally, but I've got a quibble with your last paragraph. I'm tentatively in agreement that stars are not, qua stars, optimization processes, but I'm less certain that stars do not contain optimization processes. And I'm tentatively certain that stars are the products of strong optimization pressures; how likely is star formation? Doesn't cosmological/astronomical evolution (i.e. the 'rules' by which it occurs) count as a (powerful) form of selection? There are innumerable dust clouds in the visible universe that never became stars.

Have you read 'A New Kind of Science' (yes, it's a pretentious title) by Stephen Wolfram? He has a number of interesting discussions of intelligence. Your recent posts re: intelligence and optimization processes remind me of Wolfram's statement (I'm greatly paraphrasing) that a sufficiently general definition of intelligence (in terms of information processing and something akin to your optimization processes) would necessarily include all kinds of entities that we would not categorize as intentional.