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...until we know what life is and have a proper definition, we cannot say what is the difference between the living and the non-living.... If we find a difference, then we can look at it and ask “Is this explainable by terms and reasons that the hard sciences can show?”... In other words, are the four fundamental forces and the laws of matter and energy able to explain this “thing”?

FWIW, that seems doubtful to me. One of the more interesting observations regarding the question "What is Life?" I've encountered recently was Robert Rosen's, from his book Life Itself:

,,,[T]he idea that life requires an explanation is a relatively new one. To the ancients, life simply was; it was a given; a first principle, in terms of which other things were to be explained. Life vanished as an explanatory principle with the rise of mechanics, when Newton showed that the mysteries of the stars and planets yielded to a few simple rules in which life played no part, when LaPlace could proudly say "Je n'ai pas besoin de cet hypothèse" ["I have no need of that (God) hypothesis"]; when the successive mysteries of nature seemed to yield to understanding based on inanimate nature alone; only then was it clear that life itself was something that had to be explained....

One of the few physicists to recognize that the profound silence of contemporary physics on matters biological was something peculiar was Walter Elsasser. To him, this silence was itself a physical fact and one that required a physical explanation. He found one by carrying to the limit the tacit physical presupposition that, because organisms seem numerically rare in the physical universe, they must therefore be too special to be of interest as material systems....
[Yet] Why could it not be that the "universals" of physics are only so on a small and special (if inordinately prominent) class of material systems, a class to which organisms are too general to belong? What if physics is the particular, and biology the general, instead of the other way around? ...
...[A] rather strange and dreary consensus has emerged in biology over the past three or four decades. On the one hand, biologists have convinced themselves that the processes of life do not violate any known physical principles; thus they call themselves "mechanists" rather than "vitalists." Further, biologists believe that life is somehow the inevitable consequence of underlying physical (inanimate) processes; this is one of the wellsprings of reductionism. But on the other hand, modern biologists are also, most fervently, evolutionists; they believe wholeheartedly that everything about organisms is shaped by essentially historical, accidental factors, which are inherently unpredictable and to which no universal principles can apply. That is, they believe that everything important about life is not necessary but contingent. The unperceived ironies and contradictions in these beliefs are encapsulated in the recent boast by a molecular biologist: "Molecular biologists do not believe in equations." What is relinquished so glibly here is nothing less than any shred of logical necessity in biology, and with it, any capacity to actually understand. In place of understanding, we are allowed only standing — and watching. Thus if the physicist stands mute, the biologist actually negates, while pretending not to.

Anyhoot, it seems that Rosen was of the mind that biology indeed is the "general case," and the laws of physics the "special case." Which is tantamount to saying that ours is a living universe. And he is not alone in that speculation. It also implies that biological beings are not wholly "reducible" to physics. There is something "more" there that both physicists and biologists do not or cannot recognize — very likely because their methods cannot reach to that "more": It simply cannot exist for a mechanist (or a materialist), by definition. So let's not talk about it.

djf, you wrote: "... one very interesting thing about [Stimulus-Response] is that you can look at all the sciences, the hard sciences and the softer ones, and theories about SR don’t start showing up until you get into the realm[s] of biology and psychology." Very astutely noted! In other words, into the realms of life and consciousness (neither of which have been defined by the physical sciences by virtue of their total inability to make such things tractable in terms of their presuppositions and methods).

You don't have to be a genius to recognize that you can "stimulate" a rock all day long but it will never manifest a "response." A rock is an inorganic system.

But even the simplest organic (living) systems — say amoebae or bacteria — readily exhibit responsiveness to stimulation. And more — they appear to possess some form of consciousness, albeit a comparatively low-level one. For example, Slavoj Hontela, a Czech MD who "dabbles" in experimental biology, conducted an experiment that showed the following:

Let us to observe the behavior of an Amoeba in the microscope’s visual field. We can see there an Amoeba, of Proteus species, slowly moving by stretching out its pseudopodia, looking probably for food. We place now with a glass pipette close to her few powdered pigments of a dried Chinese Ink. The amoeba stretches one of her pseudopodia to a pigment grain closest to her (evidence of a chemotaxic reaction or ability !) and involves the grain into her pushing it down to the nucleus where the digestive vacuoles are present. It is certainly interesting that the pigment transported through the pseudopodia towards the nucleus, doesn't yet touch the nucleus capsule when obviously the Amoeba recognized the undigestibility of the Chinese Ink pigment, the further transportation in the direction to the nucleus stops and the foreign body is quickly pushed back and finally eliminated from the Ameoba's body.

...From this observation it is possible to make already several conclusions:

1) The amoeba was able to recognize and approach the foreign body which might be its potential food,

2) A. was able to mobilize her pseudopodia giving them the appropriate message to approach this pigment and engulf it.
3) With a certain delay which was obviously necessary to process the information related to the characteristic of the foreign body and the realization that it is indigestible follows another set of messages and the pigment was eliminated.

...The second phase of the observation experiment was even more interesting because it brought to the evidence the proof of the presence of memory. We have removed the pigment from the underlying microscopic glass dip, we put there a new drop of clear water and again placed there another pigment grain of Chinese Ink. The Amoeba stretched the pseudopodium to the closest pigment but did not touch it and, in contrary pulled back from the pigment grain. Obviously it preserved the memory for the identification of the indigestible pigment!

Researchers working with bacteria have found similar results:

Recently, it has become clear that simple bacteria can exhibit rich behavior, have internal degrees of freedom, informational capabilities, and freedom to respond by altering itself and others via emission of signals in a self-regulated manner.... Each bacterium is, by itself, a biotic autonomous system, having a certain freedom to select its response to the biochemical messages it receives, including self-alteration, self-plasticity, and decision making, permitting purposeful alteration of its behavior.... Bacteria are able to reverse the spontaneous course of entropy increase and convert high-entropy inorganic substances into low-entropy life-sustaining molecules. Similarly, di Primio, Müller, and Lengeler ... have demonstrated that bacteria and other unicellular organisms are autonomous and social beings showing cognition in the forms of association, remembering, forgetting, learning, etc., activities that are found in all living organisms.

The passage immediately above is from "Fundamental Complexity Measures of Life," by Attila Grandpierre, which appeared in Sechbach & Gordon's Divine Action and Natural Selection: Science, Faith and Evolution. Dr. Grandpierre is an astrophysicist with the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Science, Budapest, with a profound interest in theoretical biology.

Have run on long by now, so must close. But one final point: It seems very clear to me that life and consciousness go hand-in-hand. If the "hard sciences" — or even the squishy soft ones, like Darwin's evolutionary theory — cannot deal with that, then clearly, they are, as you say djf, "TOTALLY INSUFFICIENT."

Thank you ever so much for your outstanding insights!