Why are you you? Why do you view the world from the eyes of only one meat puppet and why that particular meat puppet?

The simple answer is: you are an emergent consciousness. Your consciousness was not bestowed upon a particular human. Look at it from the bottom up instead; your sense of self arose from the brain which comes with the organism, your neural complexity (and as a result: your awareness) having gradually increased during childhood to far surpass that of the average marsupial.

What you’ve sensed and experienced and reflected on and remembered since, plus the starting conditions of your neural make-up, is what makes up how you see yourself.
tl;dr: body -> brain -> consciousness -> identity

You could only have been you. Why were you born in the 20th century? A brain matured enough for self-realisation and found itself in the 20th century. This sort of thing happens all the time. Your brain was produced in the 20th century, Herostratus’ brain in the 4th century BC, new ones are on their way. New brains maturing elsewhere in the world will not add to your consciousness and you will not become self-aware ever again, as they will be different brains.

Now, the obvious implication… is that our sense of self is bound to our body, and thus highly susceptible to stopping to exist at all. In that respect my answer will satisfy few people.

And this is justified.

The concept of an end to existence (and mind you, that also means the end of any realisation of an end to existence) is unacceptable. Even the most rational human beings only manage to accept it through considering it a permanent sleep or by not thinking about it too much. Only in a close brush with death do we set our claws in life, hoping we still get the time to berate the universe enough for it to feel guilty about producing organisms self-aware enough to realise they’re leading a life shortly before it is gone forever.

For our sake we should deliberately believe, regardless of arguments to the contrary, that we are immortal souls on a temporary sojourn into concensus-reality, or a new knot in the tapestry of the One Mind.

To be able to do so, I suggest using the pliancy of quantum mechanics for all its worth, and to consider the mystical visions induced by salvia or ayahuasca as real rather than hyper-charged imagination. It makes all the difference.

You are you, because you wanted to experience a life where you stumble upon an article about consciousness and firmly decide to join the author’s cult, whatever else it entails (= pancakes).