What is Life?

We propose a definition of life as a nonlinear dynamical process that generates, moves, and coevolves through mutual informational, structural, and functional complementarity. Across multiple scales, it repeatedly alternates between divergence and convergence of functional complementarity, balancing possibilities and constraints amid fluctuations of support and selective pressures in both the world and itself. Through competition and cooperation across time and space, it preserves solutions to bottlenecks in energy flow, information storage, and functional complementarity, and it tends to favor collapse-resistant nonlinear dynamics, thereby deepening its capacity to persist. Life explores and learns through chained processes in which support and selective pressures alternate between favorable and adverse conditions.