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Assuming that death is the permanent loss of personal existence, what are we to make of it? Would immortality be a blessing or a curse?

When the great ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus was asked what death was to him, he simply responded: ‘nothing’. It was Epicurus that gave us this most famous quote: ‘death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us. So long as we exist, death is not with us; and when death comes, we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter is no more.’

For many - myself included - this presents itself as a clear and rather reassuring view. However, can it really allow us to dispel our in-built dread of death? I read Epicurus’ quote and felt an assurance that did linger for a while. But in all honesty, my attitude towards death remains adverse. Ultimately, I don’t seem to be able to shake the feeling that, simply put, death is bad.

One of the explanations embraced by many philosophers lies in the deprivation theory. This is the view that we are rational to fear death, because once we die, we are deprived of the good things in life. Discussing the philosophy of death at Yale University, professor Kagan recently gave an example: ‘If I get hit by a truck tomorrow,’ he says, ‘that would be bad, because if I hadn’t died, I could have lived another 30, 40, or 50 years of a good life.’ Kagan then goes on to imagine dying at the age of 80 from heart disease. He still asserts that this too would be bad, again for the reason that ‘If only I hadn’t died, I could have lived for another 5, 10, 15 or 20 years.’

If life was full of purely good things then surely the deprivation account would be right - the best possible thing for us would be to never die, wouldn’t it? To never stop these experiences, the obvious answer is immortality. However, it’s not quite that simple.

It is crucial to recognise that sometimes things that are good in limited quantities become bad if you get more and more of them. Kagan gives us a very simple example: say you are a chocolate lover, and you have just received a box of them. You are very happy and eat 5, 10, 20 pieces. As enjoyable as they are, the more you eat, the more nauseous you feel; and at some stage you’ll just have had enough.

Bearing this in mind, I began to wonder whether immortality would be good after all. Imagine that your endless life progresses in the same way that it does now, with a continuation of the kind of changes that your body undergoes as it gets older. However, instead of those natural changes killing you at 80, 90, or 100, they don’t. The changes are cumulative, but never add up to death. This is exactly the thought experiment Jonathan Swift undertakes in a passage from Gulliver’s Travels. He imagines Gulliver coming across a country where a subset of the people live forever - the immortals. At first, Gulliver thinks it is a wonderful thing. But he soon realises that the changes that they normally undergo continue to accumulate and that these people get not just older, but weaker and in more and more discomfort, until senility sets in with a vengeance and all their mental faculties disappear. Swift paints a gloomy picture of an immortal life which is increasingly defined by pain and the sheer void of impotence as the body deteriorates until it becomes utterly infirm. At this point Swift concludes that if immortality was like that, it would be horrible. In fact, for such immortality, death would come rather as a blessing!

But of course when people wish for immortality, what they’re really wishing for is an eternal life where the goods of that life outweigh any afflictions. So feel free to throw in health and enough money to make sure you’re not poor for eternity – after all, wouldn't it be horrible to be healthy but impoverished forever? Make sure you’d pick whatever you need. Some of our readers at Eulogy said they’d be travelling every corner of the world, reading books or playing harpsichord ‘until the end of time’ – which will never arrive, by the way.

The question now is this: would an immortal life be desirable if it was a good life that never ended? Is it even possible to have a good life that never ends?

As Kagan puts it, it might be very tempting to say: ‘Of course, nothing could be easier. Just imagine being in heaven.’ Wouldn’t we all love to live forever in heavenly bliss?

Well, the trouble with heaven is, we’ve been a little bit vague about what exactly life is like up there. Would we be singing psalms in Hebrew? Hanging out with beautiful angels? Or praising the Lord forever? It is a striking fact that even those religions that promise us an eternity in heaven or its equivalent are rather shy on the details. When I wondered why, the best answer I could get was this: because if you actually try to fill in the details, this wonderfully eternal existence ends up not seeming so wonderful after all.

Any existence I could ever begin to describe is one I would eventually be stuck with, forever. And that is not desirable at all. As one of the most brilliant British philosophers, Bernard Williams, said: ‘No kind of life would be attractive forever; it would eventually become tedious, and then even worse, excruciatingly painful. Every kind of life would be a life you would eventually want to be rid of.’

If we are convinced by Williams’ words and agree that immortality would be bad, then we cannot say that death, per se, is bad. Because if the only alternative to dying is immortality, the very fact that we are going to die turns out to be a very good thing indeed. You might love chocolate, but for how long could you bear to continue eating it every day?

Ultimately, I think that Camus was on the right lines when he said: “The infinite value of life lies in its very finitude”.