LIFE is a chemical phenomenon, but it's distinctiveness lies not in the chemistry as such but something even more profound —
The “simplest" self-sufficient replicating cell is a complex information-processing system.
The ‘cheerful’ argument goes, “If enough monkeys pecked away at typewriters long enough, they could eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare.” However the tested reality is—“If a trillion monkeys were to type 10 randomly chosen characters a second it would take, on the average, more than a trillion times as long as the universe has been in existence just to produce the sentence: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’" —William Bennett; professor of physics at Yale University, 1979
Something more wonderful than the complete works of Shakespeare is here— irreducibly complex, computationally intractable, infinitely more precise. “The information content of a 'simple' cell has been estimated at around 10^12 bits of data, comparable to about a hundred million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica.”—Encyclopedia Britannica 1974, p. 894
Effectively processing that 10^12 bits of semantic content, inanimate molecular machines communicate, cooperate, and interact in concerted purpose with other cooperative, interactive, communicating, inanimate molecular machines. By means of this complex information-processing system, the “simplest" self-sufficient replicating cell produces hundreds of different proteins and other molecules, “on cue” and under variable conditions. Synthesis, degradation, energy generation, replication, maintenance of cell, architecture, mobility, regulation, and communication —all of these functions take place in virtually every cell, and each function itself requires the interaction of numerous inanimate parts including membrane, chromosomes, ribosomes, nucleolus, nucleus, mitochondrion.
Consider just one part of one part of all the cooperative, interactive, communicating parts—DNA. It contains the information processed by a self-sufficient replicating cell “The efficiency of DNA as a carrier of data is so great that if all the information held within all the libraries of the of the world (about 10^18 bits of data) were programmed onto DNA, that information would fit on about 1 percent of the head of a pin!"—Siemens Review 56(6):1-7, 1989