This note refers to the only biological life we’ve observed so far: the one on Earth.
From Sara Walker’s keynote at Alife 2020: The Natural History of Information:
Life is a process whereby information structures matter across space and time.
Why should life be an emergent process? An answer from (Krakauer et al. 2020):
The fact that physics and chemistry are universal—ongoing in stars, solar systems, and galaxies—whereas to the best of our knowledge biology is exclusively a property of earth, supports the view that life is emergent.