Dominant by our definition of domination, life by our definition of life, known as in known to us.
Okay, now you're just arguing over semantics. Things mean the things that they do because we say so, and to be able to have a coherent discussion, we must agree on a set of meanings.
And you never really did anything to confront my implicit claim that unliving organic matter is still essentially the same thing as living organic matter.
I'm not too well-versed on this, but the thing about life is that life sorta emerges as a result of its structure. Life may be made of the same things as non-life, but structure and order is how any of it works. There needs to be these long-ass chains of proteins, lipids, and other stuff. It needs to have order to be able to even begin being life.
If I blended a snail, would it be alive? No, the structure of the snail has changed so much that it can no longer undergo its life processes. It may now have the same exact components of a living snail, but that mess of blended snail ain't living. The structure, the order that allows life to emerge is now gone. All I'm left with is a mass of blended snail.
It's all about emergent phenomena. Complex things can emerge from very simple rules, but for it to even emerge, it must have some organization first. If it is taken away, the emergent phenomena disappears. You smash a CPU into a thousand pieces, do you think it'll still open Chrome if you put it back into its socket?
At least, that's how I think it goes. I'm not a philosopher, nor a scientist. It's all a mess of different facts from entirely different domains mashed together into... this.