Sort of a complicated question, I'll try to ask. How was I born me and not another?

[Alex K]

So, I have been wondering for some time why I was born me and not someone or something else. Doesn't it seem a bit strange, to have come into the consciousness of a body? We just happen to be one animal out of so many species of animal that have existed on this planet. I wonder how it all came to be, how I was born me and not a dog, and why do I feel consciousness when there's trillions of cells in my body that don't have brains of their own. My hands, my feet, they all have living organisms inside of them, and somehow these are a part of me? It's all so strange, I wish that there were some answers to basically explain my existence.

Or hell, there's so many types of matter, I could have just as easily have been a rock.

Maybe you WERE born as someone else instead of you! How would you know the difference?

Mind blown.

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Alright, I think I found a better way to state the question. Everything from the start of the universe, all the particles in the known universe come from the big bang, or as carl sagan would say, we're all made of star dust. So if I'm just made of star dust, and the rock around me or the cup on my desk are also made of star dust, then out of all the other matter on earth that came from the same place, why did I just happen to become a human being? All the hamburgers that everyone consumes that become babies that mothers give birth to, that came from the hamburgers that their mothers made. I guess it's sort of comforting in a way, because even if your consciousness is destroyed, even if all your memories are disintegrated, once you decompose you go back to the stuff that made you up in the first place. I just wonder, what was the journey like from me being inanimate material to becoming a living, sentient organism.

Remember that you are throughout your life not even made of the same atoms - they get exchanged all the time. In your sense, you're not even the same person as you were a few years ago.