You experienced nothingness before you were born, and I believe you return to that same nothingness when you die.
An afterlife is highly illogical and makes no sense according to the laws of science. Reincarnation makes more sense than an afterlife does. Life is rather cyclical in nature, and reincarnation would be in keeping with that cyclical nature. Although I don't really believe in reincarnation either, but it makes more sense than an afterlife does. I believe that when we die there is nothing.
I sorta believe in reincarnation in a final fantasy 7 sense where your body gets broke down into energy and gets distributed among other things like plant life and so on. That lines up with what you said I guess but it was that game that made me first really think about it.
Well, yeah, that's not a unique concept to just FF7. Our bodies literally do return to the earth when we die. Our bodies rot and decay and eventually our molecules break down and return completely to the earth, and then new life is born from that. That's the cycle of life, and a basic rule of science is that matter can never be created nor destroyed. Every new life is born out of the matter of the old dead lives.
The real question is whether of not such a thing as a "soul" exists. We simply do not know if anything like that exists, and there is no way of actually proving it. If a soul does exist, maybe it goes on to an afterlife (heaven/hell) or maybe it is reincarnated in a new body or maybe it wanders the earth as ghost or maybe souls just don't exist period. Who knows. Nobody knows.
Yeah I mentioned 7 simply because it's what made me really think about it and this is a video game site so it felt fitting to mention it. Either way I don't think our consciousness will remain. ---
Cid- "looks like that overgrown lobster just got served!" Bartz-"with cheese biscuts AND mashed potatoes!"