The Coin Flip: A Different Perspective

[Abion47]

The way it's portrayed in SOMA IMO isn't really possible, except if the game (at least up until the ending of Omicron) is played as a flashback of Powersuit Simon's memories, (or in the case of the post-credit scenes, the whole game is played as a flashback of Ark Simon's memories).
And I say flashback because it wouldn't be possible to control your memories, you would just "have" them.

The problem is that, if the events before a copy were just flashbacks of memories, then the player could make Simon do stuff that would be completely out of his character, or things that would result in Simon never being copied at all. It would also not explain how the ending of the game transitions into the epilogue. Sometimes, the way that events of a player-controlled game play out is merely a narrative tool, that there isn't any actual continuity attributed to the exact way a story plays out. It's like how, in a book, the perspective of the story can change from one character to another in the next chapter in order to give the reader a bigger understanding of the world - it's not trying to imply that the consciousness of the narrator is actually flitting from one person to another.

When I originally proposed the idea of the game being the perspective of Simon-3 and everything before the copy at Omicron being a flashback his memories, it was to demonstrate how the copies perceived the illusion of continuity. The perceived timeline of each successive copy is unbroken - it's not just their memories, but their very perception of being. So they believe that their existence is continuous, even though it's not. Simon-3 is a great example of this, since he "experienced" the transfer from Toronto to Pathos-II, and then from Imogen Reed's body into Raleigh Herber's body. When he got to Phi, he then experienced what the original Simon's did, the lack of a transfer and continuing to be the same Simon as he was before.

This comparison was meant to demonstrate how the coin flip doesn't exist, even metaphorically. Each copied Simon believes themselves to have won the coin flip because they perceived a continuous transfer from the old Simon to the new Simon. The point, however, is that even that continuity isn't real. Their entire basis for believing that they existed prior to the scan is their own brain's coping mechanism for handling something that humans have never had to deal with. The concept of the coin flip is their way of explaining the result of a process that they thought was basically glorified magic.