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Thank you so much for the pings to your sidebar! I'm playing "catch up" here because of my involvement in other things. So rather than mentioning specific posts and excerpts, I'd like to address a few points generally as follows:

Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communications concerns the processing of signals. In that regard, the information is the action not the message and therefore is portable to many applications including computing and molecular biology (pharmaceutical and cancer research.) More specifically, as mentioned before information is the reduction of uncertainty (or Shannon entropy) in the receiver (or molecular machine) as it goes from a before state to an after state.

The formula for Shannon entropy is similar to thermodynamics – and the thermodynamic tab is paid by the dissipation of heat in the molecular machine as it goes from a before state to an after state.

The components in Shannon's model include sender, message, encoder, channel, noise, decoder, receiver.

Component functions in computing, on the other hand, are input, output, process and database. The “message” may be input via interrupt, input via cycle or derived from the database. And except for those processes which are hard-wired, the message itself may be “soft” instructions (“software”) which then affect the processing.

Herein we have a parallel to the DNA encoding. It also may be seen as containing a set of instructions, altering the process itself.

Nevertheless, when a message of any type is no longer being communicated successfully the cell, or functional subsystem of the organism, or organism or collective – is dead. And if it could never communicate successfully it is non-life in nature.

This of course is only speaking of things which occur in nature. Computers are not alive in this sense – neither are robots or artificial intelligences.

But using information to define “what is life v non-life/death” in nature accommodates any non-carbon based life forms we might run into in our space exploration.

As to soul and spirit, I echo betty boop’s remarks – science does not have the necessary “tools” to address these issues. They are more appropriately in the domain of theology and philosophy and metaphysics.

But math and science can go a very long way indeed on answering the origin questions before arriving at a point they must “give up.”

1. Origin of space/time.

2. Origin of life.

3. Origin of inertia.

4. Origin of information.

5. Origin of conscience (sense of right v wrong, good v evil, etc.)

6. Origin of consciousness.

But as rightly noted several times, before we can muse about these origin questions, we must agree what we mean by "space/time" "life" "inertia" "information" "conscience" and "consciousness"