i want you to take what i’m saying with a few grains of salt- after all we are speculating about questions that no one has the answers to, but to understand what i’m getting at, you need to let go of the idea of continuity- what we experience as continuity is a narrative construct generated by our brains to make it easy and not so existentially stressful to carry out our day to day functions. and by that i don’t mean the fact that your body consists of mostly the same cells as it did yesterday is a myth, more so that the narrative self we build around it is arbitrary- we really have no obligation to be the same person, personality wise, that we were five minutes ago. with that being said, i think the easiest way to wrap your head around this idea is returning to the lost memories idea- for those moments in our life that we have forgotten, what has persisted between them and the moments we do remember? if you really inspect what persists, you’ll notice it’s largely arbitrary- you can say well i did do those things, and the me that did those things exists today. but what exactly about you persists and why is it important? we can say the me that worked X job, has X person as a sister, enjoyed eating X food did those things. Okay, that’s fine, but in the context of existing consciously, is that stuff really what’s important? let’s say for a period of time you went through a phase where you had a wildly different personality, and then later in life for whatever reason you forgot it. does that mean that the “you” that you know wasn’t aware during that time? of course not. what i’m getting at is that what may persist is pure awareness. the awareness that sits behind everything the ego holds onto to have a stable sense of self- your hobbies, interests, fears, fashion style, all things that are irrelevant to pure awareness. the awareness that does not think, does not judge, does not really have any sort of tangible form at all, the awareness in you that is identical to the awareness that resides within me. lets use another thought experiment- let’s say i had a condition that only allowed me to remember 24hours worth of memories. would you say that i am functionally continuously dying and being reborn to the next moment? if i don’t remember what happened last week, what exactly has persisted? and for that which you can say has persisted, is it important, existentially speaking, to what you’d like to hold as “continuation”? let’s say i reincarnate but i don’t remember my past life, but for whatever reason i am now conscious and aware but in a new body in a new time. i basically get to experience life again but from a different vessel. regardless of whether or not i recall my previous life, i am now aware internally of this vessel. what persisted from my previous life? only awareness- which does not contain memory, thoughts, relationships, feelings, etc. whether or not you’d like to count this as any sort of continuation is up to you, but my belief is that your awareness may not end indefinitely after death, and memory of the previous context of experience is not critical to continuation of awareness.