Life's characteristic feature: staving off max entropy

"What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on 'doing something', moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to 'keep going' under similar circumstances. When a system that is not alive is isolated or placed in a uniform environment, all motion usually comes to a standstill very soon as a result of various kinds of friction; differences of electric or chemical potential are equalized, substances which tend to form a chemical compound do so,  temperature becomes uniform by heat conduction. After that the whole system fades away into a dead, inert lump of matter. A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of 'maximum entropy'" (p. 69).

from Erwin Schrodinger's "What Is Life?"

This conceptualization of life as an organization of matter into a set of persisting interactions with its environment that lend some kind of creedence to the possibility of seeing the originating conditions of life as a sort of gravitational effect to the substances that adhere for a duration to the scaffolding of an organism as it is in the process of self-organizing. But is there a crucial component in the whole ensemble or is there just some 'emergent effect' of the whole together? This is hard to figure out. I used to look at intelligence as a feature of the selective membrane, the basic datum of in/out as a configuration of space and time, and perhaps that is the essential character of the thing. Or is there something underneath this? Some life/intelligence Brownian motion that stirs a thing into an organism with orchestrated actions?

There's a concept concerning tensors that attempts to describe the actions of things like electromagnetism, that is, it's thingness in the fact that two objects can attract or repel each other at some critical distance, which gives the intervening medium some character that needs to be described. How this 'force' operates at a distance is the thing in the question: 'how is electromagnetism a thing?'

Some of the hokier, new-agey visions of the earth as this resonant structure that gives all the things around it a similar harmonic is both dream-catchery and in and of itself true. Perhaps, this 'crystalline' feature of DNA is a feature of the earth's iron core emanating a harmonic field that establishes an affordable 'low energy state' to the possible configuration of proteins in the lattice work of DNA that we know. That, at the foundation of the DNA is a recording medium enabled by the harmonics of a rotating ferrous 'plasma' core that is perturbed continuously by the day-to-day features of existing bathed in the electromagnetic radiation of a sun to produce the all the little 'evolving' chemistry experiments in the vast biomass of single-celled life in this world. Everything above that level is simply an afforded compilation of possible collaborations between various discreet versions of these single-celled life forms and the various lab bench chemical transformations they allow within the confines of their selective membranes.