Sara,
Pg 3 "We must therefore assume, right at the outset, that the "all life is chemistry" picture is inadequate to address the question at hand. We must ask, if life is not just complex chemistry, then what is it?"
One of my mentors, a Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, since deceased, stated that "everything" is a specialized form of "energy."
Pg. 3 "As we now learn it in school, the central dogma of molecular biology states that information flows from DNA - RNA - protein. In reality the situation is much more complicated than this simple picture suggests."
I realize your essay is not about the specific structure of biological organisms, but about "information" the structure contains. (74 instances of the term "information" in the essay)
It is the form the information takes that is important when referring to "Shannon information," and in the context of biological DNA "information", it is in part its helical structure, and it is very efficient. DNA Digital Encoding
I wonder how an intelligent species would encode information, and transfer it in some manner, such that it would be understood by another intelligent species that they did not have prior contact? Perhaps you could ask Paul Davies.
Top-down causation may not be appropriate, perhaps mutual causation. It has been demonstrated that a pair of geometric structures, if properly paired, mutually define their dimensional sizes. See the IEEE paper referenced in topic 1294.
Then there is the issue of, "why helical?" A somewhat dated article covers the issue. Chirality What possible influence in the universe is responsible for all the helicity and spin, with a left hand bias?