Life can't exceed the capabilities of its substrates on their own terms, but it's not clear that life can be fully explained in or reduced to those terms either.
I’m glad you made this point, because it allows me to issue a cautionary word to those dualists who think that somehow the mind is something disjoint from the brain.
Yes, I'm glad you mention that; unfortunately I think sometimes the idea that causation may be multi-dimensional (in other words, that there is not necessarily a single implicative model capable of wholly explaining all things) gets mistaken for some sort of dualism.
But that view does not imply that mind and body are disjoint, are separate "essences", etc.