Life is not an ephemeral process in an entropic universe. Life is a process that has a duration that exceeds that of star-life.
Life’s strategy for running against the second law of thermodynamics, and expanding and conserving ordered structure over vast periods of time, is a strategy of encoding information and retaining it—in other words: languages. And these languages—which are abstract systems of notation that can be laid onto nucleotides or coconuts or scratches on clay or whatever—allow the conserving of complexity.
