A Structural Account of the Transition from Chemistry to Life

This paper offers a structural account of the transition from chemistry to life. Instead of treating life as a special substance, a statistical anomaly, or a collection of biological features, the model identifies the minimal operators that make living organization possible: collapse, mediation, constraint propagation, boundary formation, and directional persistence. These operators transform an undirected chemical manifold into a system capable of maintaining itself, reducing uncertainty, and generating coherent behavior across scales. The account explains why life emerges only under specific structural conditions, why it forms a stable and distinct class, and how self‑maintenance and directionality arise without invoking improbable events or biological assumptions. The result is a domain‑neutral mechanism that clarifies what life is in structural terms and how the transition to living organization becomes possible.