Dying has always been a Big Bad but an inescapable one, and the human race has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.
This seems right. Every pro-death argument I've heard either veers into the supernatural, or has the texture of rationalization. So I don't think that's where the real argument lies.
What you want to ask, is, what makes life good? And, frankly, life is good so long as it's comfortable, interesting, satisfying, presents an amount of novelty that suits your tastes, contains time with other people whose company you enjoy, and so on, and so on. To vastly oversimplify, life is good when it's sufficiently Fun.
Plenty of folks won't agree with this, but for the sake of argument, suppose that: If a life is mainly Fun, it's good, and if a life is instead mostly Unfun, then it's bad.
Suppose that Alice believes this, and Alice is fairly intelligent. Moreover, Alice has had a mostly unpleasant life, and there's actually no one in the world who cares if Alice is alive or dead. In a hypothetical flash, Omega appears and offers Alice a choice: immediate, painless death, or thousands of years of life without mental or physical degredation. What should she do?
I'd suggest she take the long life, and here's why: even if Alice's life, up to now, has been pretty crappy, a life of thousands of years is probably going to be pretty good. Alice should have plenty of time to learn what she enjoys: how to make the world around her more comfortable, and who to surround herself with, and how to do interesting and satisfying things, and so on and so on. If Alice sets herself to it, she should be able to make her life good, and for quite some time.
(Yes, you can imagine unlikely scenarios where Alice will be forever prevented from enjoying her life, but they're unlikely. Tiny probabilities of very bad things need to be counterbalance by tiny probabilities of very good things when you're computing expected outcomes.)
So: if you don't have a sense that life is good, perhaps you should spend more effort making it so.
Let it be noted, as an aside, that this is my first post on Less Wrong and my first attempt at original, non-mandatory writing for over a year.
I've been reading through the original sequences over the last few months as part of an attempt to get my mind into working order. (Other parts of this attempt include participating in Intro to AI and keeping a notebook.) The realization that spurred me to attempt this: I don't feel that living is good. The distinction which seemed terribly important to me at the time was that I didn't feel that death was bad, which is clearly not sensible. I don't have the resources to feel the pain of one death 155,000 times every day, which is why Torture v. Dust Specks is a nonsensical question to me and why I don't have a cached response for how to act on the knowledge of all those deaths.
The first time I read Torture v. Dust Specks, I started really thinking about why I bother trying to be rational. What's the point, if I still have to make nonsensical, kitschy statements like "Well, my brain thinks X but my heart feels Y," if I would not reflexively flip the switch and may even choose not to, and if I sometimes feel that a viable solution to overpopulation is more deaths?
I solved the lattermost with extraterrestrial settlement, but it's still, well, sketchy. My mind is clearly full of some pretty creepy thoughts, and rationality doesn't seem to be helping. I think about having that feeling and go eeugh, but the feelings are still there. So I pose the question: what does a person do to click that death is really, really bad?
The primary arguments I've heard for death are:
I think that overall, the fear most people have about signing up for cryonics/AI/living forever is that they do not understand it. This is probably true for me; it's probably why I don't grok that life is good, always. Moreover, it is probable that the depictions of death as not always bad with which I sympathize (e.g. 'Lord, what can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?) stem from the previously held to be absolute nature of death. That is, up until the last ~30 years, people have not been having cogent, non-hypothetical thoughts about how it might be possible to not die or what that might be like. Dying has always been a Big Bad but an inescapable one, and the human race has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.
So: now that I know I have and what I want, how do I use the former to get the latter?