To properly explain what I think a good life is, and why I hold that belief, I should first explain what I think life is. To me, life is like a flipbook, if a flipbook had billions of pages and flipped one page every thousandth of a second. Every page besides the current one holds whatever it is you were, or are going to be, at the time the page was or will be shown. The page currently shown is the one you currently are. The pages include one’s thoughts, emotions, senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, etc), memories, dreams, physical feelings and more. Whichever of those someone is currently experiencing, is what makes up one’s current page. The pages that come before are your previous states, and the pages ahead are states you haven’t yet been in.

Some “pages”, or states, are good, and some are bad or neutral. The good states are the ones that feel good. Similarly, the bad states feel bad. As people can feel both good and bad at the same time, to different degrees, the greater feeling decides the goodness of the state. If we could analyze experiences, the calculation used to determine the quality of a given state would be “Intensity of Good Feeling(s) - Intensity of Bad Feeling(s) = Quality of State”. For any given Quality, good or bad, the numbers greater than it would be better states, and the numbers lower than it would be worse states. Negative numbers would be bad states, while positive ones would be good.

Laughter, love, happiness, comfort and pleasure are some of the things that can make a state good, as they all make that person feel good. Specifically, the part of the feeling that feels good is what makes the state good: for example, in the case of laughter, a joke isn’t what makes a state good, it’s your brain’s reaction to the joke that makes it good. If you were to strip the laugh to its goodness - if you were to take away the hurt sides, the context, the joke, the smiling, etc - you would be left with pure Good Feeling. Similarly, pain, sadness, discomfort and grief are some of the things that can make a state bad, and they make the state bad because of the “badness” found in those feelings. All feelings and experiences that do not feel good or bad are neither good nor bad, unless they contribute to one or the other, in which case they are indirectly good and/or bad.

To find the best life, one would find the sum of all the Quality of States the person had. This sum would be the Quality of the person’s life, very similar to the Quality of State. Unfortunately, human brains were not meant for that. I blame Evolution. If humans could just make themselves feel as good as they wanted, whenever they wanted, we would have died out long ago because we wouldn’t do anything else. Good feelings, for humans, are rewards. The best possible life would be the greatest possible Quality of State, kept for as long as possible, but the human brain cannot do that. Rewards are only given when you achieve something. The human brain is a very annoying thing to work with, if that’s your goal.

There are many ways to make your life’s many states high Quality, but I feel our collective time and effort would be better spent making a system better able to do that than the brain is. It’s important to remember that the limitations of the brain are only there because those limitations were/are what’s needed to progress our species, and bring it to the level it is today: hypothetically, there’s no reason a state couldn’t be whatever we wanted it to be. In the human brain, and in human life, you almost always need to pay for your good times with bad times, but I do not think that is a law of the universe. If humans were to create some sort of machine, or artificial brain, that could manipulate states the same general way our brain does now, it would be completely able to give people the highest Quality state and keep them in it for as long as the thing could be kept alive and/or running. It would give people, if they could still be considered people, the best possible life. The entity would have no thoughts, no senses, no concept of time, nothing except pure Good Feeling, for as long as it was kept running/alive.