On the other hand, you're not fighting off vicious fauna and plus-size insects ;)

If they had gotten heads, you won't exist. :)

Given the butterfly effect, if they'd used a different coin and got tails, he wouldn't exist either.

I wonder how signicant the butterfly effect is in most cases. Most human systems are set up to allow a wide range of flexibility and still work - eg you can show up for a coffee meeting 1 minute late, and still finish on time and everything.

But he wouldn't know he doesn't exist.

His/her consciousness might exist inside a different person though.

No, I pretty definitely wouldn't exist. My father's family has been in Canada a lot longer, and I'm half him.

Ok but maybe your father or mother would've had a baby with someone else, and then you'd be that person.

I'm not even the same person as who i was yesterday.

Everytime my stream of consciousness stops and starts I am a new person built from the thousands of lives that came before.

This is not a saddening fact but an enlightening one. We all stand on the shoulders of those that came before us.

I thought we stood on their heads...

You are your 'current' feelings and your past memories. The reason for the downvotes is that from your logic mabbo is every person who has ever existed in the history of the human species. Since every person has their own current feelings and past memories, saying mabbo would have been that person instead is a little meaningless.

I don't understand how people can adopt this line of reasoning, can you explain? Do you think that there's a store of consciousnesses somewhere, and they're reserved/assigned?

They're actually unassigned, but you can pay $35 to reserve one. It's like Southwest Airlines.

What do you think a consciousness is?

Really got the tail-end of that deal......... i had to