The target of this paper is to draw a comparison between information in living systems and information in inorganic contexts. The two representative contexts we will refer to are those of an organism and of solid state physics. We have published extensively elsewhere on the properties of a model hierarchy (e.g. Cottam et al, 2003; and most recently Cottam et al, 2016; Cottam et al, 2017), and to reproduce the entire derivation would be inappropriate for this extended abstract. Consequently, we will restrict ourselves to the brief sketch which follows, in the hope that this attenuated version is sufficiently comprehensible.