No, death is a travesty. While it may be true that overpopulation is worse, death is awful. Painful, slow degeneration over decades as your body systems shut down and your loved ones watch.
What a gain it would be to have people continue their productive lives for decades or centuries longer.
The costs: we would give up having children. The replacement rate for an immortal race must be very low. The weight of old, bad ideas might be harder to shake off.
> The weight of old, bad ideas might be harder to shake off.
This sort of thinking seems to me a consequence of assuming that brains are somehow separate from the rest of the body, almost bordering on dualism.
They might be easier to shake off, and I suspect this to be the case, if all human brains are rejuvenated brains with 25 year-old physiology. It is not clear that "old people set in their ways" is a result of minds that have simply been around a long time, regardless of their physical condition (i.e. immortal or not), as opposed to a consequence of a physically aging, deteriorating human brain.
So we might find ourselves with the equivalent of a population composed entirely of twenty or thirty-somethings, except some of them happen to have many decades (eventually centuries and millenniums) of experience. We may well be much better off than now.
So do you volunteer to stop taking vaccines, treating bacterial infections with antibiotics, reject medical intervention in the case of acute injury, etc? I rather doubt it, even though we take all these radical inventions in the prevention of death for granted.
No, you see, our current medical treatments and the resulting longevity are exactly optimal given human social psychology. Anything less is backward and primitive, and anything more is scary and weird.
What a gain it would be to have people continue their productive lives for decades or centuries longer.
The costs: we would give up having children. The replacement rate for an immortal race must be very low. The weight of old, bad ideas might be harder to shake off.