If you live N lives then the chance that this is the first is 1/N. I don't know about you, but I don't remember anything from any previous lives, so it seems to me there's a (N-1)/N chance you don't get to remember anything from previous lives anyway.
It could be a question of soul distribution, though; if you can only have one ghost in each machine, and there's the potential for a spacefaring civilization to expand to many, many planets in the future, then it's possible that the 50 or so billion people who have lived since humanity's birth represent only a sliver of a fraction of the total number of souls needed to staff a well-stocked universe. So we could potentially be heavily weighted towards most people being on their first go-around if we have the potential to make it that far and souls or selves or whatever are actually scarce enough to be re-used.
No. All of the reality as we know it is just a software bug, with the fix request sitting in some junior developer's project management system. They just haven't gotten around to submitting a pull request yet.
I also find it interesting that all the information in our DNA and what our body does with it is a form of 'remembering' what has been transmitted from previous lives, right ? :)
What if, in a similar way, what we learn here is compressed and optimized for next lives - things that are called 'talents', 'instinctual knoweldge', 'natural gifts', etc.
There's also no guarantee that past or future lives happen in the same type of body (or same planet or even same Universe).
Hence, all the information learned in this one will be useful at some point in this or another life.
Now I don't know what to do with this information .. I don't want to need it..
And then if fate really leads me to fall from a plane, I will definetely remember this article which will seem infinitely funnier in mid flight.
Heck if I don't hit the ground laughing my ass off !