I know your looking for a straight answer, but questions like this don't really have satisfactory answers due to them not being scientific questions. The definition of "best life" will be fundimentally different for everyone and the actual best life for each person will be consequently unique. You might define your best life as having lots of money or cars, while I define mine as acquiring and sharing knowledge and skills. Neither life is superior, just yours might suck for me and mine might seem tedious to you.

That being said, given hypothetically infinite time, then everyone would logically get to live their defined best life at some point. However, because time has a definitive beginning (at least as we currently understand it) and is therefore not infinite, we would never be able to empirically know if we had reached peak life experience or if one of the infinite possibilities that never happened would have been better.

In case the reincarnations go on forever, then yes, I think the best life is inevitable. I'm amazed. I've thought about this concept in the past, but I always imagined the negative consequences - everyone would have to experience the very worst suffering there is. The fact that you took it from the positive side is mindblowing to me. Good for you!

Ahh, I remember when I posted this.

Egg Theory

I'm atheist so my understanding may be slightly off, but from what I've gathered. Reincarnation is a bad thing. Reaching enlightenment is the end goal and breaks the process of Reincarnation. The goal is not a perfect life. It's breaking the cycle.

That would also imply everyone gets to live the very worst life imaginable too

I don't think there is a single best life. No one's life is perfect, and there is certainly a lot of bad luck that a single person can experience. Everyone lives their own life. Sometimes it's a wonderful adventure, sometimes on easy mode, sometimes life sucks and you have few if any choices to change it. Reincarnation is just pressing play, again.

How will you know if this life is better, it not as if you know right know, so how will you tell? Don't overthink, live! PS: i do not believe

Boiling it down to its bare essentials, I think the question is really whether or not it’s plausible to claim that getting potentially unlimited resets, but still tracking each entity from a finite pool, with the ideal goal of any one given entity changing on each reset in a non-deterministic way, there would eventually come a state, in which each and every single entity has, at some point, encountered their then active ideal goal.

If we don’t track the entities and/or the pool is not finite, then I would say it’s simply impossible. But even then there are boundaries and variables that need further defining.

But if we assume the initial scenario I described, then sure, I think it is inevitable that a finite set of beings will eventually have all experienced their ideal goal, at some point, assuming the goals are, too, finite. And even then the one limiting boundary — time — would have to be infinite. If not, then we’d also have to define the entire thing further.

The best life? Probably not.

What's the best life possible?

Honestly, if you have a pretty good life, and you are wired for happiness, that's about as good as it gets. Wealth, ability, fame, respect... Those all have an aspect of continuous struggle. And ultimately, it'll be subjective

But someone with a happy childhood, low stress, satisfying relationships, and an enjoyable, stable daily life? Coupled with a brain wired to enjoy life? I'm not sure it gets much better than that, and there's people like that everywhere.

So I'd say yeah, probably

You mean a sort of Pathfinder/dnd?

If I’m not mistaken, if you behave badly in life you are sent to one of the evil/chaotic planes; otherwise to the good ones. If you die there you die tho, no more reincarnation. And if you go to one of the bad planes, you will “die” in a way as to survive cause unless you are very special you are doomed to be eaten (literally).

Dunno how the actual religions behave on the matter.

Personally, while I hope that reincarnation is a thing it is mostly to not be afraid to die… after all, even if it were a thing I wouldn’t remember a thing about this life no? If I did, I would know right now that actual reincarnation is a thing. Since I can’t possibly know that reincarnation is a thing, and I don’t know cause I don’t remember a previous life that means it either exists but I don’t remember a thing or it doesn’t exist and when I die light’s out it’s over. In any case, for the living me it leads to the same problem(s).

Going back to your original question: assuming that we indeed reincarnate, with or without memories, then yes given an infinite amount of lives we will experience both the worst and the best

Best as defined by whom?

What if the best life was someone so into Coprophilia that they get more happiness out of being surrounded by and even eating shit than anyone else in the universe has experienced happiness about anything? And then they got a job for 40 years cleaning porta potties and even when they could retire don't in order to keep it up?

Is it just maximal dopamine and serotonin? Maybe then the best life is a drug addict with a gambling addiction but a lot of luck?

Or maybe happiness is more a matter of perspective than external circumstance once past the bottom layers of Maslow's pyramid, and there's many lives that could be a best life to the right mindset.

I'm not even sure it takes living multiple lives to end up living the best life, and potentially pushing the pursuit of living one's best life off onto the next one is a damaging prospect in and of itself.

What if you spend every life waiting for the next attempt rather than maximizing the life you have?

We live to learn, to learn you must suffer. Buddah lived in a palace without knowing illness, old age and death and only when he discovered them went into a path of suffering and learning until he became enlightened. Plus ultimately if you have the right mindset any life can be the perfect life for your soul.

Philosophically, the premise is flawed. Best life... according to whom?

I mean, the best life for a slug or a fly won't cut it for you. I can imagine a fly being born in such conditions that from that fly's perspective it would be 'the best life' imaginable... for a fly.

There's this passage from Roger Crisp's Mill on Utilitarianism, where he proposes this thought experiment. There one reads:

"You are a soul in heaven waiting to be allocated a life on Earth. It is late Friday afternoon, and you watch anxiously as the supply of available lives dwindles. When your turn comes, the angel in charge offers you a choice between two lives, that of the composer Joseph Haydn and that of an oyster. Besides composing some wonderful music and influencing the evolution of the symphony, Haydn will meet with success and honour in his own lifetime, be cheerful and popular, travel and gain much enjoyment from field sports. The oyster's life is far less exciting. Though this is rather a sophisticated oyster, its life will consist only of mild sensual pleasure, rather like that experienced by humans when floating very drunk in a warm bath. When you request the life of Haydn, the angel sighs, ‘I'll never get rid of this oyster life. It's been hanging around for ages. Look, I'll offer you a special deal. Haydn will die at the age of seventy-seven. But I'll make the oyster life as long as you like...’"

So, a pig or Haydn? A fly or your own life right now?

Everyone ? but it's just me. A few reincarnations from now I might be you, or a lemur from Madagascar. It's just me, bro ! you're me ! I am you !

No. Even if reincarnation exists, time is finite in the universe. You wouldn't have an unlimited amount of tries to guarantee the best outcome.

Top intellect, creativity, productivity, wealth, family, friends, deeply satisfying happiness? In my opinion those would be the ingredients of a perfect incarnation.

Reminds me, I know a man who is living this life right now and I've told him a few times, he is living the best life known to human potential.

And he's humble too so he hasn't fully embraced my lofty assessment of him 😄

As AwakeSoul/Buddha tried explaining...

and as Hindu Ramana Maharshi also tried explaining...

WHEN one reaches such fundamental-awareness that there is NO self in it...

it is AWARENESS,

THEN, one only has to dissolve into that OceanOfAllAwakeSouls/OceanOfAWARENESS/OceanOfBuddhas/God.

No self, indestructible bliss, Eternal awareness, watching all unfolding endless-stream-of-Universes, as magical display...

No, not every Souls/CellsOfGod/Continuums get to experience amazingness incarnate.

Elisabeth Haich commented on that, in her book "Initiation".

Some Souls/Continuums, or their natures/characters, chose aversion-therapy reincarnation-cycle, for whatever reason.

It's a Bell curve, probably:

the normal is to have an average "pinnacle", and an average "bottom-of-the-barrel", and an average set-of-between-range incarnations/someones/lives.

Only the more-extreme would inhabit the more-extreme ends of the bell curve.

Same as all Nature...

_ /\ _

Well, I don't believe in reincarnation, so NO.

But suppose that I did. What does that mean? Do you retain your memories and respawn like a videogame character? Get to be a baby who knows everything as an adult? That's a weird life, and probably not "best".

If you don't retain your memories, then what is "you"? Some kind of … virus? Whatever, hopping between bodies, unable to do anything to affect their outcome. So now it's down to random chance.

What's the "very best life imaginable"? Imaginable, not real? The real life you spawn into isn't going to meet that standard, so never.

Like most religious ideas, it doesn't define any of its terms, and they don't make sense when you do.