At one point he affirms a kind of law of conservation of information, but at another point he says that a simple roll of the dice can increase the amount of information. Is the latter an exception because of the role of a human intelligence? But that intelligence did not know the outcome: it could have been replaced by a dice rolling machine, etc. Or a natural event could have caused the dice to roll. In such a case, would information have been increases or decreased?
How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
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