Life ≠ Alive

Under this definition, it's meaningless to speak of life on other planets. What would you call xenoreplicators?

I don't think you understood the previous paragraph; the view I'm espousing that Alexander laid out is universal and objective. It has nothing to do with culture, but everything to do with physical systems, it is a lens by which to measure the nature of order, or in other words, life itself as a universal quality of configurations of matter.

We are not sustainably increasing order on the planet Earth, and if current trends continue, we will see an incredible amount of life / order disappear into entropy. That's a fair prediction given current evidence. Your statement about my worldview is akin to saying 2 + 2 = 4 is not universal, never mind that that formalism is dependable in this universe. Maybe in some other universe 2 + 1 = 4, but not in this one.

You can disagree with the model that Alexander lays out, but the correctness of that sentiment has nothing to do with "20th century cultural angsty baggage".

Then your argument train of thought stops at the station of "there is one ant organism" and "there is one human organism".

Yes, the inherent ability of surviving on one's own is important. An ant can. A Silicon Valley software engineer can. A Wall Street hedge fund manager can. However, it will not be long. Mostly due to their stupidity. Don't base disconnection of survival needs and general societal stupid as a way to define "alive" as well. The specialization factor creates ecosystems. Ecosystems are not organisms. We can draw parallels, yes. There are plenty of fun parallels. The same way we can draw parallels to galaxy clusters and the way an eyeball iris structure is formed. But let's not be silly about it. This is literally the joke Douglas Adams was making in Hitch Hiker's Guide. We are all not one big computer (organism) with one goal.

What I'm trying to understand is the desperate want for "machines are alive" argument. It's now come to the point that a dead cat should be considered alive and a functioning human is now not alive? This is some serious post-modern logic that just blows my mind.

Let's take it a step further. So an ant can't survive long outside of a colony, it's not alive. If you pull a fish out of water and it can't survive long, then it was never alive to begin with? But since some people can't survive in Alaska by themselves (or anywhere else isolated), that means humans aren't alive. Perhaps isolate someone by shoving their face in water and they end up not surviving long, they were never alive anyways. Because they couldn't survive outside their environment. Like an ant to a colony. Love to see that logic used in court. Oh but, because we still have the corpse, the person should still be considered alive, thus there was no murder to begin with.

This seems to be a semantic argument. That is, an argument that attempts to describe or reframe an existing semantic meaning.

It is interesting in the way it attempts to shoehorn this meaning into broader idea of information theory (or perhaps also pan-psychism or stoic philosophy). However, rather than taking the lead from information theory, that nothing in particular is special or has meaning, the article digs it's semantic heels in and claims a differentiation between life and not-life. Why? Or at least, why the arbitrary line it has drawn?

All particles process information as far as we can tell. Why the differentiation between those things we "know" to be alive vs those we are not sure of. Surely any decent improvement on the current semantic categorisation of life cannot take as a starting point that very categorisation.

Whenever i read someone trying to redraw semantic definitions always reminds me of xkcd 927.

That's exactly what I'm getting at! My idea here is strongly influenced by the thinking of Stanislaw Lem, who tackles this problem extensively in his works. He points out that it's very earth/bio-centric to assume that "life" on other planets would resemble in any way life on earth, and comes up with hypothetical life-forms that demonstrate this principle.

If we come up with some abstract definition of "life", then it seems like "life" is a fundamental thing of which "life on earth" is just one particular manifestation. Following that, we imagine that there are other specific instances in the universe that implement that general principle.

On the contrary, I think biological life is highly determined by its history and the geo-chemical particulars of earth itself, not by some fundamental principle. If we find extra-terrestrial "life" it's possible that the history and geo-chemical particulars of its evolution are so different from ours that we fail to recognize it as life at all.