@emergence “would it be accurate to understand negentropy as a sort of life force energy?”
No. Energy is the potential to do work and a force is an influence that causes a free body to accelerate. A difference in entropy is not necessarily a potential to do work nor does it influence the acceleration of objects. It is simply the result of the use of actual energy to put things in an ordered state. Life creates negentropy, negentropy does not necessarily create life. It is found in systems that take advantage of relative entropies. A living organism uses energy from chemical reactions in order to maintain an entropy state lower than its surrounding environment. That’s it.
Entropy is not really a decay, it is simply the movement from ordered to less ordered states. I wouldn’t call heat transfer a form of decay, but heat transfer is the increase of entropy of a cooler system.