Are you with Leibniz or Cicero?

[Mudhammam]

If I have to relearn everything, then it is not I who am living the next life which makes the entire proposition nonsensical other than to say I am simply rewinding the tape and doing it again. Your invocation of different circumstance suggests we are not simply rewinding the tape so I must press, do I carry forward my knowledge and experience, or don't I?

It's not my intent to be a burr in the saddle, but I think the distinction is crucial to the thought experiment.

I suppose it depends on what it is that we understand personal identity to hinge on; if it's memory then I'm not sure if it's more problematic that one would fail to remember a past life than it is that they can't remember the majority of their past in this life. If someone suffers a brain injury and they lose all of their memory, are they a different person? What about a person who's in a drunken stupor and recalls nothing the next day? Or my failure to retain each individual moment of the past hour... Was the person who did those things, of which I share no connection with now (to the extent that I am self-aware), the same me? And it doesn't seem helpful to bring in physical identity, as our physical parts are always being replaced with new parts. If the "I" is the continuity of consciousness, then I might be a new man every morning that I awake from a deep slumber, and as there are people who actually believe they were once Napoleon or Jesus Christ, or even a wild animal, it's obvious that my past memories in which I think I remember what I did yesterday or a year ago can be deceptive...