We can define and analyze 'life' without any reference to life: As high-fidelity self-replicating macromolecules that interact with their environments to assemble and direct highly responsive cellular containers around themselves. There doesn't seem to be anything missing from our ordinary notion of life here; or anything that is missing could be easily added by sketching out more physical details.

What might a purely physical definition of consciousness that made no appeal to mental concepts look like? How could we generate a first-person facts from a complex of third-person facts?