It is very sad to hear your story. I can give a guess about the awfulness of what you are going through, but I am more certain that I cannot appreciate the full daily horror for you. Your question is a most reasonable one. Is your mother "alive"? It is interesting that you feel obliged to put this word in scare quotes. It is something that "you can't stop asking yourself". So there is something very important here, an important issue. But you have also answered your own question, or part of it. Let us distinguish between the mental and the physical. Is your mother alive physically? Her body is not dead, if we can put it that way. Is she alive "as a conscious being"? Here you give your own answer: ' . . . she is unconscious about anything [that] is happening around her.' I think perhaps you should say that she is conscious only of the most immediate and restricted domain. That perhaps is part of the reason the question is difficult. She is conscious, but not in a full sense. The whole difficulty about...

DNA does change. There are "point mutations", for example, in which say a single nucleotide changes, say from guanine to cytosine. . . . CTG TCA . . . becomes . . . CTG GCA . . . If there is a strand of DNA that suffers such a change, is it then not the same strand of DNA ? This is exactly like the question whether persons become different persons if they lose say half a finger. And now we have the problem of DNA identity. When are two descriptions sufficiently similar to count as descriptions of the same strand of DNA ? Anthony Quinton has the general issue right, in a 1962 article in the Journal of Philosophy called "The Soul": 'No general account of the identity of a kind of individual thing can be given which finds that identity in the presence of another individual thing within it. For the question immediately arises, how is the identity through time of the identifier to be established? It, like the thing it is...

There are several sense to the word "life", which derives from a Norse word having to do with the body; in German we have Leib , body. (1) There is a biological sense, which used to be taken to say that things possess life only if they possess respiration, excretion, reproduction, growth, irritability - I like this one - and cells. Locomotion is also characteristic of animal living things. Physiological life is life in this sense. (2) Life can also be taken to be consciousness or psychological life, so that only conscious beings have life; but I think that this should be taken to mean that only conscious beings have a life. Grass is alive, practically eternal, but it does not have a life, and we do not say that the different kinds of grasses lead separate lives because they don't lead lives at all. A derivative sense here is a life, meaning a biography, as in "A life of Churchill". A life in this sense is a book. (3) "Life" can also mean "way of life", so habits, customs and attitudes,...