There is an awful lot going on in your question, and some of it I do not feel qualified to respond to. In particular, I think a complete answer to your question would require a good deal of work from contemporary theories of the mind, as well as how these theories inform questions of personal identity. So what I am about to say is only a very partial response (and may be inadequate even at that!).

To be frank, I think the whole idea of life after death is--at least in the various ways I generally hear it characterized--probably nonsense. To see this, let's begin with your experience of yourself--what it is like being you. Think about this for a minute to bring in into focus (as best as you can), and then try out a few of the popular afterlife options:

(1) Now imagine being both you and also, say, a chicken. Peck, peck...cheep, cheep...nice beak! Nah--you have no idea what it would be like to be a chicken, and whatever that would be like, it most certainly can't be anything like what it is like to be you. Maybe your atoms or molecules could become atoms or molecules in a chicken, but that hardly makes the chicken a new embodiment of you. Now I cannot "channel" chicken minds, of course--indeed, I can't even channel yours, despite our shared humanity (this is the famous "problem of other minds"). But I think you will find it is more than just a mystery to think about you being or becoming a chicken. So I am inclined to think that whatever your causal relations with the chicken who lives (on) after your death may be, there is no sense in thinking that the chicken will in any cogent sense be you. So much for transmigration of souls.

(2) OK, now imagine you having a different human body. Suppose now you are an adult male Chinese. OK, now imagine being an infant female from the Aka tribe of Africa. Wah! Got it? ...I doubt it. As I said, there is not only a problem of other minds here, there is also the problem that our personal experiences seem to be gendered (which can sometimes create very difficult challenges for transgendered people, whose personal experience--you might say personal identity--is one of the opposite gender than their own body). But then, what would it be like for you to be a member of a completely different ethnic group, with a completely different personal, familial, and cultural history, and so on? In what sense would that person be you? To go back to my example, you were an infant once (in some historical sense, at least). What was that like? You may have childhood memories that seem to be part of your current identity, but I doubt that you have any idea what it would be like to be you and at the same time be an infant. But if there is "life after death" in some meaningful way, there would need to be continued personal identity before and after death. That's my question: does it really make sense to think there could be an identity relation between you and the Aka baby girl? Say what??? So much for reincarnation.

(3) OK, well try this one now: imagine being both you and also a disembodied soul. Look Ma! No hands!!! Yeah, and no arms and no legs and no shoulders or hips; no belly or chest, no head, no brain...nothing but...well, whatever! What would that be like? Well, speaking just for myself here, I can't wrap my mind around the idea at all. Everywhere I have gone in life, my body has been with me all the while. Now, some people claim to have experiences "astral projection" in which they have experiences as of floating outside of their bodies. Could be I am stupid about this simply because I haven't had such an experience myself, but I wonder what they were seeing with since they didn't have eyes at the time? What would that be like? Damned if I know... To be frank, from an experiential point of view (in order words, in terms of my sense of self), to be me is to be embodied as I am. Even if some disembodied thing (whatever that might be!) conceived itself as in some way identified with me, I'd be inclined (at the moment, anyway!) to deny the conception and identification: whatever it is to be a disembodied thing, that can't be aligned with what it is to be me. So much for the separation of soul or spirit from the (dead) body.

Here's the litmus test I am proposing: what it is like to be you is either consistent with whatever the afterlife experience is supposed to be, or else whatever follows your death will not be you in an afterlife. Given the various kinds of nonsense I have heard about "the afterlife," I find absolutely no reason to think that there will be such a thing that I could count as me surviving my own death. As for you...well, I don't know what that is like, so...

Vincent Barry's Philosophical Thinking About Death and Dying is a good first source for an accessible discussion of some of the relevant issues. It will also give you some suggestions for further reading.

These two anthologies have some relevant essays:

Life, Death, and Meaning edited by David Benatar.

Philosophy and Death edited by Robert Stainton and Samantha Brennan.

And one recent book on the subject is Mark Johnston's Surviving Death.

I'm sure that others will chime in with more suggestions for you, but I hope that these can get you started.

Great question and suggestion! While some philosophers (most notably John Locke) have claimed that the key to personal identity is memory, probably the majority of philosophers today do not. Most grant that you might endure as the self-same subject despite all kinds of memory loss and replacement.... So, if it is a fact that no one does remember their past lives, it would not follow (on many accounts of what it is to be a self), this may be only a problem of epistemology and we cannot from that alone assume that reincarnation is false. Probably one reason why some today think reincarnation cannot occur is because they think that for reincarnation to occur, a person (self, subject, soul, mind) would need to switch bodies. Those of us who are dualists or who think there is something to persons more than the material body, may well grant that it is possible for a person to come to have a new body. But materialists who think that you and I are our bodies will have grave doubts about whether we can survive the destruction of our bodies.

Lots of interesting questions here, and I won't try to do all the issues justice. But a handful of quick thoughts.

First, philosophy doesn't usually have a perspective on a question because the questions philosophy deals with tend to be inherently controversial. Philosophers have views, but there's almost always disagreement amongst philosophers on almost all philosophical topics. This one is no exception. That said if you were to take a poll these days, I'm pretty confident that at least among philosophers in the "analytic" tradition (very roughly: influenced by formal logic, science, careful attention to language and meaning...), you'd find that most don't think there can be consciousness without a body to embody it. This is largely because the more we learn about the workings of the mind, the more we see that it's intimately connected with the functioning of the brain.

Turning briefly to one of your examples: suppose a bit of information were taped to the top of a tall object in an operating room. And suppose it turns out that a patient who reports a near-death experience is able to give a detailed account of the information, even though from the operating table there was no "ordinary" way to see it. What would this show?

It's not at all clear. In particular, it's not clear that it would do much to support the idea that the mind is separate from the body. What we'd have is someone whose brain is functioning now and never actually died. Somehow, this person has some information that we wouldn't expect him to have. But what best explains how he came to have the information is hard to say - even if he reports an experience of floating above the operating table. Saying that the mind separated from the body and travelled up through the room to examine the information doesn't help much. How would that work? Does the bodiless mind have eyes? How did the interaction between whatever was up there on top of that tall object and the disembodied mind work? How did the information get stored? How did the mind reconnect with the patient's brain?

The point isn't that the mind must be embodied. The point is that a case like this would only amount to good evidence for minds separate from bodies if that idea gave us a good explanation for the case. As it stands, it's not clear that it gives us much of an explanation at all, let the best one.

I'm not quite ready to go along with my colleague's answer, but my answer isn't any more hopeful.

If time has the structure of the real line (as we usually think) then even if it's infinite, every moment is only a finite time away from now. (Compare: every real number is only a finite distance from 0.)

But even if time is infinite in the way the real number line is, it doesn't follow that there will be a duplicate of you somewhere off in the future. To get that conclusion woud take a lot of extra and optional premises. More important, even if there will be a duplicate of you someday, there's no good reason to think it would be you, nor is there any good reason to think that you could look forward to its experiences. (These two aren't quite the same issue, as it turns out.)

Clearly there's a lot in the background here. If you're interested in more reading on the core problem, i.e., the problem personal identity, you might have a look at Martin and Barresi's anthology, called Personal Identity.

I don't see why since if time is indeed infinite the point at which that occurs may be infinitely in the future. Not a great deal to anticipate in that case, then!

The remark that murder is a victimless crime, while surely ironic, hits home. As Alexander George remarked a while back on this site in response to a related question, "death is rather peculiar...in that it's a misfortune that eliminates from the world the subject of the misfortune." Alex went on to say that "once one's dead, not only does one cease to experience things, but one ceases to have interests too," which, he explained, makes the question of what harm is caused by death difficult to answer. Alex's response concludes where your question begins: "As one of my students once asked when we were discussing this in class: 'So murder is a victimless crime?'."

The fact that the victim of a murder dies may make it difficult to say in what respect the victim's interests suffer in virtue of that victim's death, which complicates the question of who is harmed by murder. This question, however, is distinct from another question that you raise: "why is it that we find the thought of murder abhorrent?" or, to reformulate the question: What's wrong with murder? Although the answers to the questions "Who is harmed by murder?" and "What is wrong with murder?" are surely related, they need not be directly conceptually connected. (Whether they are is another, good question, which I won't take up here.) I propose to focus on the question of what's wrong with murder.

It seems to me that a murderer manifests a callous disregard for the value of another's life, and, also that a murderer arrogates the right to dispose of that life. (Perhaps it's because the murderer has no regard for the value of another's life that the murderer can dispose of it.) This, it seems to me, is what is so abominable about murder. But why is it abominable to think that one has the right to dispose of another's life?

Various justifications can be given for the respect in which it is wrong to think that the murders has the right to terminate another's life : religious, political, moral. I'll give an example of a religious justification and an example of a political justification. (In a theocracy, a religious state, a religious justification could of course also be a political justification.) One might say that murder is wrong because in so doing one assumes that one can dispose of the life of another, but it is only God's place to do so, and, moreover, one has a duty of charity to love one's neighbor as oneself; one might say that murder is wrong because no individual has the right to infringe on another's pursuit of her own interest, provided that such pursuit does not infringe on one's own interests, and, in any event, one does not have the right to terminate altogether the possibility of another's pursuing her own interests (at least in one's own name, as opposed to on behalf of the state).

Each of the preceding answers makes substantial, albeit defensible, presuppositions about the nature of religious obligation and also the nature of politics, which one may well wish to reject. The question then, becomes one of determining what is the best basis for grounding the claim that it is wrong to think that one has the right to murder another person?

I don't think it is morally acceptable to joke about tragedies. While I know that it is part of the orthodoxy amongst comics to try and be edgy, perhaps even to try and shock, cracking jokes about thousands of people being killed and thousands upon thousands more losing their homes certainly evinces a lack of compassion and humanity. I don't have a syllogism to proof this but I think that finding entertainment in tsunamis, or maybe next, the holocaust, makes us more indifferent to others and is bad for the soul.

Before I get to your question about death, I would really like you to reconsider your view of what life is all about. The view you express on this topic is generally called "hedonism," and this view is met with fairly strong resistance in most of the philosophical literature. Are there no bad pleasures (e.g. that of the sadist, as he tortures his victims)?

But let's focus on your main question. As you note, some people believe in reincarnation. To be honest with you, this view does not seem coherent to me. Consider the claims made about reincarnation as claims made about personal identity. So, for example, I die, and "come back" as a chicken. In what sense is that clucking, feathery thing me? It doesn't have my tastes in philosophy, art, music, food, or wine. It doesn't read Plato's dialogues or know Greek (or English!). I think about what it is like to be a chicken...and I come up empty. And I am pretty sure that the chicken also has no idea what it is like to be me. Now, I do know what it is like to be me, and I think that knowing this--what it is like to be me--is essential to what it is to be me. So, if the chicken doesn't (and, I suspect, can't) know what it is like to be me, and I don't (and can't) know what it is like to be that chicken, then I can't understand how to make any sense at all of the idea that that chicken is me. Of course it isn't!

The same goes for me becoming a disembodied being (in the limbo line, or in Heaven, or Hell, or wherever). What would that be like? I confess I can't do any better on this on than I can do on the chicken hypothesis. I know what it is like to be me--but when I think about that, the fact that I am embodied is something I simply can't imagine away. I can imagine being me with one or more of my limbs missing. But no body at all? Nope...I can't imagine what that would be like, but whatever that thing is (or could there even be such a "thing"?), it ain't me.

Or maybe I could become a ghost. What would that be like? Hmmm...sounds pretty much like "disembodied being" to me. In what sense would that thing be me? No arms, no legs, no belly, genitals, head, face...nothing? I would be able to see (without eyes) and hear (without ears), and move about (without moving legs or arms)...? Say what? I have no idea what that would be like...but I do know what it is like to be me. So, again, I conclude that whatever people might have in mind as "my ghost," that thing is not the same thing as me.

So, if any of these scenarios is supposed to give me any kind of reasonable hope for the afterlife, I'm afraid they all seem like complete failures to me--I simply have no idea at all (and I suspect, neither do those who advocate such views of the afterlife) how whatever they are talking about can possibly qualify as "me" after death. Remove that vivid and very personal experience of being me and try to identify that thing with a chicken, a disembodied spirit, or a ghost--or, for that matter, a different human being--and I think the claim of identity simply fails. Whatever that thing may be, it ain't me.

Here is a thought: what is so difficult about thinking that you might cease to exist? It sure seems like there was a time before you existed. Why can there not be a time after you existed, when you don't exist any more? On what basis (other than some absurd hope or religious belief) wouldd you expect to be immune from non-existence? Just like before you lived, plenty of stuff was going on in the world. And the world will still be very busy after you are gone. That's just how things work--why is that so difficult to accept?

A very thoughtful article against the right to take one's own life is David Velleman's "A Right of Self-Termination?", in Ethics 109 (1999), pp. 606-628. I disagree with his conclusion, but his position is the one that has given me most pause about my own.