Is DNA alive?

It seems like it is just a chemical that cannot do anything on its own. You put the crystal there, and it stays there until something happens to it. It only assumes an identity when it is implanted in the correct place. It seems like a specialised cog in a machine. The machine cannot work without the cog, and the cog is nothing without the machine. The machine acquires some identity from that cog, but the cog is a cog on its own.

So what actually gives something a life? Or an identity? What separates one being from another? Are two chairs of the same model exactly the same? What about the cells that are separated after the fusion of the gamete? Do they each have an identity? What about each red blood cell? Are they identical?

If you can physically map out the position and velocity and type of every particle in a person's body (i noe its impossible, but if) and produce an exact copy of it onto another place, would that person think he is the "original" person or the produced person?

Does the identity of a person depend on his own memories or the memories of the people around him concerning him? As a solipcist i suppose i'd take my identity as the former. The thing is that every time i sleep, i forget who i am and i live as a different person. For that instant somehow i just "know" what everything in the dream world is, who each person is, what their names us what they do beofre etc. I forget who the person i am is when i am awake. So have "I" become a different person?

Apperently the person that "I" am in the dream has different memories from me. "I" have no connection whatsoever with "me" here. What makes both of "us" "me"? Or rather, all of "us", each time I fall asleep and dream?

"I" am the person who can sense and think. "I" can feel my environment. "I" think that "I" exist. That is who "I" am. Even if you have my memories, you are not me. Even if I lose all my memories, I am still me. I am not Yak Xin Yang. Xin Yang is my name. I am "me".