My theory on the afterlife lies in reincarnation.

Like the brain is receiving a signal (consciousness itself, or our souls) rather outputting the signal. Like a radio or TV, rather than a generator. And we are all receiving the same human signal.
So if we are all the same to start, based on our childhood and genetics, we shape our personalities. Your parents are uploading (like a computer software) their personality and genetics into you and your brain and shaping you and your brain will take a lot of those lessons and also put its own spin on them.
But when we die, we say that we live on through our kids because those kids were molded by your personality and your lessons and genetics and now by your memories. We all impact each other in every day experience, so that when someone passes away we all carry a piece of them in us, and those memories and experiences will shape our personalities from that moment on. 
Physically someone can be gone but just the thought of them inside of your head means that this universe has not simply erased them from all existence.

So when you (in theory) come back as a baby, as fresh human consciousness all together, as another human in another family - now you are seeing the results of your own work from a new perspective. 
(your "own work" meaning you are seeing all humans and more specifically, your own children from your past life that you mentally molded and used your previous bodies DNA to make.)
You might get a helpful hand from a stranger who is just being nice and courteous because she remembers a time that someone else was courteous to her. Now you have felt the ripple effect of yourself. Like a chain reaction.
You have sent out a ripple effect of yourself - onto yourself - to mold your future self.
I think the main point of "family", besides genetic similarity, is that it gets a bunch of humans together that wouldn't normally get together in a normal social setting if they were just strangers.
But you learn to love them even though they are very different from you.
The exact moment we are conceived, the ONLY thing 100% promised to us, is death. Because death is the other face of energy. Just like you cannot have dark without light, you cant have good without bad. "Front" does not exist unless there is a "back". Alan Watts talks about how the sun is only light, if you have eyes to perceive it as such. Without eyes, the Sun has a whole new purpose and is just energy. A pillow is only "soft" in comparison to a tree trunk. Its all relative.
So I dont think anything related to "Joey" or my personal little character I have created comes back again or even goes anywhere else, because all I am is the exact same thing we all are.
Maybe someday in another life I'll read a book written by someone named Joseph Kenny explaining all this weird trippy stuff and then he'll be my favorite author and have a big impact on me and help shape the way I perceive and interact with reality.
So then is he actually dead?