Is life a form of computation?

This feels like the kind of popsci that's written for people who already agree with the author - there's nothing resembling an argument, or even a definition of "computation." There are nods to Church-Turing, but the leap from "every effectively calculable function is computable" to "life is a computation" is larger than anything you could fit in a book.

Yes, the article appears to be a short excerpt from a book and probably loses a lot of context because of that. I am interested in the questions raised by the author but will wait for the book to come out. The good news is that it appears the book will be open access - MIT Press seems to be encouraging this lately (at least by allowing this as an option for authors).