Question for fellow atheists, and others if you like.

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This is a very interesting topic, one I myself have indulged in from time to time.
I think the answer became more clear to me when Dolly the Sheep was cloned.
She was her mother 100%. In every physical way, except...how could that be?
In order to be her mother, she would have to literally retake and experience every detail of her mothers life in the exact same fashion and in the exact same time line as her mother.
Rather than go into a long debate, because its 5 am here and I need to get some sleep, and because from what I have read, you all seem to be smart enough to fill in the blanks, heheh, I will just summarize right to the end point.
To do this we'll have to do some hypothesizing of course.
Lets assume that you were able to stop your self from aging for say, up to 30 years. Cloning is available, and used together, you can actually regrow a whole other, "you", right up to the age you are now, we'll say 36.
In order for this clone to be a perfect mirror image of you, and I mean in every way, it would have to experience every tiny minute detail of the life you lived, at all the moments that you had personally experienced them. This is not possible, but it is crucial to make it work. Yes, you could get this clone to be so similar that its "scary". But that isn't what makes him you.
We are defined not just by what we experience, but by when we experience them, and (more often than we realize it), other things around us that at the moment dont seem to be integral to the experience itself. But those "minute details" set the mood for the particular experience, like weather, background noise, some other unrelated event.
But it doesn't end there either.
How we react to a situation, is almost always based upon things we have already experienced. Not being able to recreate every minute detail of your life for your clone to experience at the exact times that you would have experienced them, therefor alters your clone, even if only slightly. This in turn, will alter any further experiences, again, even if only slightly, but from here out, further deviations to how the two of you will handle events will slowly grow larger, cause an even greater variation of the the, "two yous".
And that is what makes you, you. It is not the physical part, but the mental, emotional "stuff" that, while many might experience it, only you will react to it in the exact fashion that you do.
Hope that helps you some.

I have lived quite a bit longer than anyone posting here (which does not qualify me as having any opinion superior to anybody else) and never had the slightest intimation of a soul. In my very personal opinion it is total nonsense. But one thing does bother me a great deal. Modern physical theory perceives time as a totality, like space. I have inquired at physics sites and received no answer to the question of why I feel myself in a specific moment that keeps changing. I have been told it is an illusion. There seems to be no physical answer to what is "now".

Sand:
Now doesn't exist in the way we would normally think of it. Now is simply the state the energy of the universe is in, however it's always changing. Unless you could measure an amount of time that was infinitely small, you could never isolate a frame of time in which energy was not in movement. It is indeed a strange concept to ponder, as I have many a time before.

Nachtus01:
I completely understand what you're saying, but I don't think it quite hits my question, though that is most likely my failing, not anyone else's. This concept is intensely difficult for me to describe. I'm not really so much confused about what makes me so unique, so much as why THIS life is the one that I am experiencing. It's not that I feel this life isn't one that I'd want to experience, but how is it that I came to be this experience, as opposed to another experience, or no experience.

Even though the universe seems random at times, there's almost always a method behind the madness - a natural process for such things. Winds used to be thought of a random or the whims of gods - but we understand why they flow the direction they flow now. In fact, the winds cannot possibly flow any direction but the direction that they do, as they follow the laws of physics and nature. Therefore, what law of physics or nature makes this entity MY entity.

I think this is the very root of why people are attracted to religion, & why they persist in it despite its myriad implausibilities, & the constant erosion of its domain by the advances of science & knowledge. The mere fact of consciousness is so strange, the sensation of living inside your skull & of being separate from the rest of the universe - & of thinking that strange despite never have known anything else - is so strange that it makes it seem that the universe can only have an explanation that revolves around us. But I guess consciousness is just a useful illusion - with benefits superfluous to requirements - produced by the chemical make-up of our brains.

I'm not quite sure that what the op is asking is anything more sensible than asking, why is that tree that tree rather than another one? or why is my car a toyota rather than a merc? & that it's just the addition of consciousness to the question that makes it seem mind-boggling.

Am I missing something?

we are us because of some way of unbelievable luck, in my opinion. i think everyone is alike except literally just a different number of proteins in a gene or however that works. your you thanks to evolution and thats it. luck and for a soul i have an extremely difficult time believing that thanks to evolution again. the best thing i can believe in is reliving every moment we live though i thats hard to believe too cause then i think about all the countless individuals before us and even the cockoroaches who we genetically alike.

by unbelievable luck i meant basically a 1 in infinity number, if you think about it if something in time happened maybe a second later most of us would never be born because everything would happen at a slightly altered time, we are us thanks to our parents having sex at just the right time and our little sperm swirling in just the right places, i think about this crap way too much

One branch of Jainism believes there is only one soul that exists outside of time but is tied to and experiences the lives of every living and nonliving thing in sequence (subjectively linear but objectively jumping around through time and space).

In short every living and nonliving thing in the universe takes turns using the same soul so the person standing in front of you in the market check out line is YOU (the same soul) and at some point either before or after your current life you will live that persons life along with the lives of everyone (human or animal) you will ever meet.