Like I was saying, your perspective works fine if you can justify arbitrarily ignoring the vast amount of data showing how our biological systems affect our minds, and consequently our personality.
Well do you think the inventors of the TV analogy were really ignorant of that?
Inevitably I have to use an analogy.
Imagine if you were remote controlling a robot somewhere on earth (to avoid the extra complication of the time delay). You would sit at your desk and run the robot, watching and maybe listening through its senses. You might even use a VR setup so you were immersed completely in the world of the robot.
Now imagine that something damaged the robot slightly. Maybe the image wasn't clear, or it was shaking, and maybe sometimes your commands would be accepted while sometimes they would be ignored or cause some sort of diagnostic. You would soon become emotional. Some combination of frustration, anger, self doubt, etc would creep in. Not only would you feel emotional, but the robot under your control might start to appear to act emotionally as viewed by others.
If you persisted with a badly damaged robot, the resulting robot behaviour might appear totally deranged.
I am sure the real split between the mind and the brain is more complex than that, but not fundamentally dissimilar. As a species we seem remarkably adept at entering other realities, when we read a book, watch a play or film, use a VR headset, etc. I rather think that is telling us something important.
You also seem to have glossed over the fact that memory is distinctly different from personhood. You as a person recall memories of your own. Those who claim to be reincarnated appear to be accessing the memories of someone else in addition to their own unique memories. This doesn't make them the same person who originally possessed those memories. At best, it's some sort of unexplained memory transfer.
Well aren't we back at my Occam's Razor(OC) point (above). By postulating that someone is accessing someone else's memories you are either postulating some form of (extremely effective) psi, or you are suggesting fraud. Assuming you aren't just trying to call all these cases fraudulent, then you have stepped outside conventional science.
If you have an explanation that uses phenomena like psi, you can't really assert that survival of consciousness after death is less simple (and can thus be thrown out using OC) than some kind of psi explanation - reading the mind of someone who knew the deceased for example.
It's a leap in logic to say, "I remember being ( insert example ), and therefore I am that person." It would be more accurate to say, "I have these memories of ( insert example ), but I don't know how I got them."
Well we might have been made anew each morning with memories from yesterday that we falsely assume to be our own memories!
It seems you've also glossed over the logic that if the mind ( consciousness or whatever other more mystical name you want to give it ) is completely separate from the physical, then by definition, there can be no physical interface with it, in which case our physical selves would be completely unaffected by it. Simply put — if it can interact with the physical, it must be physical in nature.
But physics introduced the idea that a wave function ultimately collapses as it is observed (something that ultimately requires consciousness). I am aware there are other interpretations of QM, but it is probably best to use an interpretation that goes back to the origins of QM, rather than extremely fanciful interpretations such as Everet's Many Worlds interpretation or whatever. Read Henry Stapp if you want full details of how the interface operates, or look up the "Quantum Zeno Effect".
The fact that there is a weak coupling between mind and body does not preclude the mind from continuing after the body dies, and maybe re-coupling to physical matter elsewhere.
I think science works best when it is a bit more pragmatic. Ruling out phenomena that seem to exist because some version of logic suggests they should not be possible, is a dangerous way to operate. It would have been extremely easy to argue (no doubt some did) that a particle can't have wave-like properties. It might even have been possible to take some of the early photographs of interference fringes and explained them away in some add-hoc way. I have had
almost no personal experience of psi, but I am willing to accept that others do, particularly when there are experiments that have been repeated over and over again, that show some of these phenomena exist.
David