Nonsense. The universe is discrete, which means their are very hard boundaries we must work within. This provides very tidy building blocks from which everything can be built and uncovers all the semantic handwaving.
How do you define "life" in terms of conformation differences between two physical regions of discrete space? The point of all this, which you apparently missed, is to give a meaningful grounding to any definition you might come up with. Everything is reducible to algorithmic information, so what are the measurable mathematical differences between something that is living and something that is dead? We have fuzzy heuristics for every day use, but what is the universal definition that I can use to measure anything?
"Fool's game", indeed. What is constructive about making handwaving assertions in the absence of meaningful definitions?
First of all, "everything is reducible to algorithmic information" is an assertion. Unless you back it up, it sinks to the status of an "opinion." In order for you to back it up, you have to come up with a universal algorithm. But for you to do that, you must possess universal knowledge. Now, unless you can find a way to extricate yourself from the Universe, as it were to find and occupy some "Archimedean point" outside the Universe from which to observe it in toto, the only knowledge you have of the Universe is what you can view from "inside of it." That will necessarily be a partial view. And therefore, from the perspective of your position in space and time, you cannot know all of the Universe. Which by the way continues to evolve. So even if it were possible that you could know everything about the Universe at a particular point in spacetime, you would still not have universal knowledge. For the future may contain new elements -- and probably will.
Now perhaps you might say you can derive the entire Universe abstractly, i.e., not by means of observation, but via abstract mathematics. And you may well be able to derive a Universe thereby. But my question then would be: Would that derived Universe match up with the one we actually have in every detail, at every point in space and time, including the yet unmanifested future? On what could you base an affirmative answer?
And at the end of the day, would your algorithm describe the Universe -- or only you? How could you tell?
As for "the measurable mathematical differences between something that is living and something that is dead," I suppose you'd have to look at the correlation between increasing entropy and decreasing Gibbs free energy: At some critical threshold, life passes into non-life. Theoretically, that is the point at which the living organism "stops communicating"; i.e., ceases to successfully process information. I guess that would be your "measurable mathematical difference."
Or so it seems to me. FWIW.
Thanks for writing, tortoise!