This is also my perspective, that living things are fundamentally machines which externalize entropy, and the processing of information is crucial to this task.

This is also my perspective, that living things are fundamentally machines which externalize entropy, and the processing of information is crucial to this task. The task of living is that of using information to harvest order out of entropy, much as maxwells daemon . Of course this increases overall entropy, only conserving order locally....so you could also think of life as a “fire” that burns order out of imperfectly disordered systems.