Is the idea of personal identity exhausted by the views of physicalism and dualism?

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

Personal identity has been proposed as a concept to account for the nature of the identity of a person over time, but apart from math, terms like identity lack clear definition, and a term like person has no place in an advanced science. It is not, nor can it be, a natural kind.

Nonetheless, let's tentatively regard the term personal identity as an idea, a philosopher's idea, one that is best to eschew, but which meanwhile philosophers have used as an umbrella term to be able to talk about a loose set of related ideas that actually do have a bearing on practical matters. Follow me down this rabbit hole.

We ask if there is more to our existence than this, our three score years and ten, and of course we do not know, but erring on the conservative side, many of us conclude that since there is no evidence of life after death that there is no life after death. Still others, for various reasons (no doubt optimism being one driver), wish to believe that there is life after death. In order to conclude as much, such people often posit souls, something immaterial which we are said to be really or essentially.

Does one have to posit the existence of a soul in order to believe in life after death? I don't think so. Not enough someone believes in reincarnation, that is. What do I mean? How would reincarnation work without souls? Well, it could be the case that the specific physical constitution that gives me this first-personal feeling of what of what's like to be could be or could have been constituted or reconstituted functionally so that this exact same first-personal feeling is replicated in another being. There would be, then, something of what it feels like to be me now and also at a former or later time.

Now you may ask how could an entirely different human body generate the same first-personal feeling? The answer to that question would be just as mysterious, I assume, as it is to account for something as immaterial as a soul. And of course there's no evidence for it.

Also, you know, it would be a very funny cosmic irony for the universe to replicate beings that have identical first-person feelings and yet these beings would have no idea that they have been here before or might be here again. You could easily see how the entertaining of such an idea might seem like a kind of hell, and it would help make sense of the Buddhist idea about trying to break this cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

But as I said, there's no evidence for these extravagant claims. In the interests of rationality, therefore, it's best to err on the side that all there is is this three score years and ten. However, I wouldn't want to rule out irrational and yet pragmatic reasons for why one would want to believe in life after death. For some who have lost loved ones, the idea can be a comfort. And for those who are about to die, the idea can be a comfort. It's not always best to disabuse people of their irrational beliefs, ourselves included.