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So what will knowing exactly what “life” is tell you about everything that is not alive?

Well, I don't know anything about that "knowing exactly" business. But I am fairly well persuaded by now that organic — living — systems in Nature are physically based in inorganic ones.

But that is not the same thing as saying that inorganic entities "caused" the organic ones. I note that, on the materialist speculation, "matter" — whatever that is — is the ultimate cause of biogenesis. Material "evolution" does the rest, just as Darwin describes it, in eminently crabby, Malthusian, and rather blood-thirsty terms.... :^)

If your ultimate presupposition, or initial premise, is that the material precedes Life and is its cause — that everything in Nature, or Reality if you prefer, "supervenes on the physical" — then I'd say such a premise is not only logically flawed, but has resisted all demonstration so far....

At the same time, any argument, insight, explanation, hypothesis, theory, whatever, is only as good as the initial premise on which it depends. If that premise is faulty, eventually anything built on it will fail.

So, where has the materialist presupposition gotten us? Among others things, I find the following of note:

(1) The materialist presupposition elevates physics to the sine qua non of the natural sciences. By physics, we mean the classical physics of Sir Isaac Newton, which is premised on the dynamics of discrete bodies (abstracted as "particles"), causally interacting lawfully with one another in discrete local relations. The beauty of Newton's Laws is that they apply "at all scales," whether atomic, planetary, solar systemic, galactic, whatever. Thus Newton's Laws "unite" all the scales within the 4D spacetime realm, and as such are universal within that domain — i.e., so long as transactional velocities do not approach the speed of light, and the "particle" in question is not vanishingly small in "size."
(2) One perhaps unintended side effect of Newton's splendid work was the idea that what he had described was some kind of cosmic machine; as Laplace put it, a Mécanique Céleste. If physics is the primary science, then this sort of idea is very likely to be transferred over to biology. And arguably, that is exactly what has occurred in recent times.
Robert Rosen speaks eloquently of these matters [in Life Itself, 1991]:

The Machine Metaphor
...[O]ne of the reasons biology is hard is that no one can say what an organism is. It is, however, all too easy to say what an organism is like. In itself, this is not a bad thing to do; trouble arises when one substitutes the latter for the former.

The earliest and most mischievous instance of this kind of substitution goes back to René Descartes. Apparently, Descartes in his youth had encountered some realistic hydraulic automata, and these had made a great impression on him; he never forgot them. Much later, under the exigencies of the philosophic system he was developing, he proceeded to turn the relation between these automata, and the organisms they were simulating, upside down. What he had observed was simply that automata, under appropriate conditions, can sometimes appear lifelike. What he concluded was, rather, that life itself was automaton-like. Thus was born the machine metaphor, perhaps the major conceptual force in biology, even today.

Descartes took this fateful step with only the haziest notion of what a mechanism or automaton was (Newton was still a generation away), and an even dimmer notion of what an organism was. But Descartes was nothing if not audacious. Descartes' conception was in fact perfectly timed; the triumphant footsteps of Newtonian mechanism were right behind it; the apparently unlimited capabilities of machines were already on their way toward a complete transformation of human society and human life. Why indeed should the organism not be a machine? There is no denyng the many powerful allures encapsulated in the Cartesian metaphor; it hath indeed a pleasing shape.

Aside from its purely scientific and methodological implications, the psychological appeal alone of the machine metaphor to biologists over the years has been immense. We have already noted the profound isolation of biology from the dramatic developments in physical science since the time of Newton. The idea of the organism as machine permitted at least a vicarious contact with all this; it was plausible, easy to grasp, and above all, scientific....

...[T]he machine metaphor (supported, of course, by the corpus of modern physics) is what ultimately drives, and justifies, the reductionism so characteristic of modern biology. For whatever else a machine may be, it is a composite entity; it is made up of parts....

If I might butt in here: A fundamental premise of modern physics (and biology) is that, as "systems" — organic or inorganic —are composed of "parts," then the best way to study any particular "whole" system is to fractionate it into all its lesser parts; investigate the parts, taking the details; and then "add up" all the details — thinking that a process of simple summing could ever explain the complexity of the world we see around us, or give us complete information about the Whole which "parts" individually and collectively constitute.
Continuing with Rosen:

The belief in reductionism, buttressed precisely by the machine metaphor, extrapolates ... facts back to the entire universe; there is always a set of parts, into which any material system (and in particular, any organism) can be resolved, without loss of information....

Taking a hammer to a watch, for example, will give us a spectrum of parts all right; these may be separated and characterized to our heart's content, but only by a miracle will they tell us either how a watch works or how to make one. This is because two things have happened: application of the hammer has lost information about the original articulated watch, and at the same time, it has added irrelevant information about the hammer. What the hammer has given us, then, is not so much a set of parts as a set of artifacts.

Anyhoot, it seems to me that the "materialist presupposition" has only led to such nonsense as abiogenesis theory (which presumes to say in effect that "smart chemicals" just keep on getting "smarter" in an "evolutionary process," such that once one obtains amino acids, one gets fairly quickly to proteins; and from there soon enough to RNA/DNA....

Regarding the seamless progression of proteins to RNA/DNA: Francis Crick, Hubert Yockey, Kahre et al., declare such a thing impossible in principle, on mathematical, informational grounds.

So why should we not start out with a new, more liberating premise, which is an "old" premise — that only Life begets Life? Which is the very inversion of the materialist premise....

And then we could see how all that turns out!

Jeepers, dear tacticalogic, it might even turn out to be an exhilarating experience!!!

Thanks so much for writing, dear friend!