How "reincarnation" might work?

[Phosphorescent Panties]

To be honest, I've thought about the strange circumstances required for a human being to gain consciousness. How did I come from being nothing, to being passed into my parent's gene pool and essentially being born as child. Somehow, I think that in order for one to gain consciousness and be a living organism, you have to come from a human being. It's not like the dirt around us just magically coalesces into what's required for a human being. So I think that basically it's a one shot deal, when you die it's not like your going to find yourself in a situation again where you can form consciousness.

It does make me wonder though, how did I get my consciousness? How does consciousness even form and how come we all share a separate consciousness? What is the cycle required for each individual to go from basically not existing to having a consciousness and experiencing the world. I've heard a lot of talk about copying the data of people's brains into a machine, but then wouldn't they not be the same person as the brain they were configured from? You'd essentially be making a copy of the same person, but the person who had the body wouldn't all of a sudden experience being in an artificial brain. At least, I couldn't imagine how science could ever pull that off. Maybe some day it could, I wish that we were already there.