[proc0]

Life can be defined in terms of entropy. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says it's always increasing, and it was once lower. The law only applies for closed systems, so if we generalize to any system sometimes entropy increases. Life is a system that consumes low entropy and transforms into high entropy [negative entropy]. From light to other life, life is consuming lower forms of entropy to then use it in its information processing systems.

[asdf3331]

Schrodinger wrote about life from this perspective in an article also called "What is life?"

I thought it was pretty good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F

[proc0]

Yes exactly. It's a great read. Here is the snippet about my other comment (p.25)

> Every process, event, happening -call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy -or, as you may say, produces positive entropy -and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is of death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy -which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.