Truly, I am amazed - especially here and now, in the information age - that so many still don't accept that "all that there is" extends beyond the physical. Many believe with all sincerity that there is nothing beyond that which is corporeal.
To illustrate, Id like to borrow a phrase from RightWhales post 1967 where he says:
On the Plato thread we labored diligently to come up with a definition of life v. non-life v death as the first step in trying to investigate the theory of abiogenesis.
My personal favorite was Shannon information: a thing (in nature) which is successfully communicating is alive, when it ceases to communicate, it is dead. If it never communicated, it is non-life. That particular definition is not prejudiced against dormant life cycles, viruses, prions and such. Jeepers, it is not even prejudiced against non-carbon based life (should any be discovered), etc.
We also discussed the Irvin Bauer and Javor definitions both of which contain important observations of biological life.
Perhaps someday we shall have an elegant, ideologically neutral, widely accepted, definition of life v non-life v death. And if we do, the definition itself will prescribe whether life is to be known by biochemical criteria or information theory or both (or perhaps something else).
There are roughly a googol of information bits in the universe. Something carries the information. Something made out of matter. What do you see matter made of?