Is Eternal Life Even Desireable?

[Pyrrho]

As for not existing, that is what you did in the year 1800.  So that is what the year 2200 will be like for you.

There is however an asymmetry here, because it's not the nonexistence itself we are talking about, but our attitude toward nonexistence past and future while we exist now. I'm not too  bothered by my nonexistence in 1800, but for some reason I find the idea of not being there to see Kirk and Spock fire their phasers at the Horta - an act they later regretted when they discovered the Horta was a silicon mother who was attacking people only because they were smashing her eggs - a bit disappointing.

...

You should take another look at the Epicurus quote in my previous post:

"Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer."

http://atheistforums.org/thread-32907-po...#pid926735

You can be upset now, but you are being upset about something that you will not care about at the time at all. As Epicurus states, "Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation."

You could, of course, while you are alive, be upset that you were not alive in 1800.  That, too, would be equally groundless.  But there is nothing in your past lack of existence to stop you now from being upset about having not existed before.  So there is no asymmetry in the situation, as, while one is alive, one can be upset about things before one existed just the same as one can be upset about things after one no longer exists.  If your feelings are asymmetrical, that is something in you, not the situation.