Hmm, I get what you're saying. I guess that is quite true that we still have much to learn about the brain. I can see where my analogy was flawed, and I thank you for pointing that out. But as you break things down more and more to study them, you can see that everything still fundamentally consists of bits of information. For example:

The DNA in human beings contains about three billion nucleic acids. However,much of the information coded in this sequence is redundant or is inactive. So the total amount of useful information in our genes is probably something like a hundred million bits. One bit of information is the answer to a yes no question. By contrast, a paperback novel might contain two million bits of information. So a human is equivalent to 50 Mills and Boon romances. The University Library contains about five million books or about ten trillion bits. So the amount of information handed down in books is a hundred thousand times as much as in DNA.
(Stephen Hawking: Life in the Universe, http://www.brembs.net/SWH.html)

Stephen goes on to argue that our evolution has shifted from a darwinian 'natural selection' phase to an 'external transmission' phase -- that in effect, the knowledge that we pass on through 'inanimate' books and computers are indeed a part of our evolution. After all, we are not our genes, a fact to which scientists agree.

Take viruses, for example. It is often argued whether they are living entities due to the fact that they don't meet some of the previously mentioned 'prerequisites' for life. They have no metabolism, they don't 'grow' in the same way that cells do. Yet, they do have a blueprint (RNA) and they do behave in a way that allows them to propagate themselves. Stephen Hawkings also points out that just because they must use the metabolism of a host cell to reproduce doesn't mean they are not alive. Just like most things that we do consider alive, they must rely on other life to survive.

So, I would argue that the 'biological traits' of life are incidental, and not truly dividing. Though such traits (like the presence of carbon molecules which conveniently group together to form strands of molecules to form RNA and DNA) are a common factor in all 'life as we know it', that doesn't mean that they are necessarily required for life to exist, and they're most certainly not what causes life. In fact, that's one thing that scientists haven't been able to determine, and something that they still struggle over -- if RNA and DNA are just blueprints, what is the driving force of life? How does this great machine create and run itself, with no outside intelligent force?

But as I said, if we remove this outdated context of machine and creator from the universe, and instead view the universe as the living creator of itself, this dilemma is resolved.