Existence After Death

Your disagreement is absurd. The vast majority of people on Earth believe in and actively desire eternal life after the death of the physical body. Most people do want to live forever - they'd just rather do it in a paradise rather than here on Earth, and I don't think anyone can fault a person for preferring an eternal existence without any of the concerns and stresses of the real world.Aside from that there is the simple fact that today, you want to live another day. Tomorrow, you will still want to live yet another day. Unless and until you suffer such injury or illness that your quality of life degrades to the point where you would prefer nonexistence, you will still want to continue to live every day henceforth.The entire notion of "who wants to live forever" is a coping mechanism for a species constrained by the bounds of the human life span. Everyone fears death. Everyone would prefer not to die. If you grew up in a post-death society, where nobody ever died and true immortality abounded, and someone suggested to you that "hey, let's give up this eternal existence and just go die," you'd think they were crazy. Nonsense like "well, after an eternity of living, you'd get bored" is an excuse, a made-up "positive" to death so that we feel better about the inevitable. It's proven by the fact that the vast majority of people, as I said above, do believe in and desire eternal life.

While your conclusion follows from your premise, your premise is unfortunately false. Thought and memory are not forms of energy like heat or light. Thought is a series of electrochemical reactions in your brain; memory is physically-stored patterns in teh brain that can be recalled. In both cases, the energy is not the relevant portion - it's the specific pattern of energy and matter as it processes in your brain that is thought and memory. Disruption of that pattern results in alteration or cessation of one or both. Your thoughts, memory, and identity do not persist after the destruction of your brain for the same reason that a computer no longer processes or stored information after it's been dismantled. The energy and matter currently processing your thoughts and memories will indeed continue to exist eternally, but the patterns will be disrupted, your thoughts and memories terminated.A post-death consciousness would require that consciousness not be solely located in the physical brain. That's quite thoroughly disproven by the facts of brain damage - damage or alteration of the brain causes immediate corresponding change in personality, memory, etc. If personal identity, thought, and memory were independent of the brain, then those changes would not occur; brain damage would not cause amnesia, frontal lobotomies would not alter personalities, etc.Reality is rather uncaring about our own preferences.That said, some form of immortality is not necessarily an impossibility. Researchers are investigating the causes of aging and how to diminish their effect or stop aging altogether - whether such a thing is possible given human biology is still unknown.Personally, if we go far out into the realm of science fiction, I'd prefer to have my brain patterns uploaded into a computer, preferably through a slow process of iterative augmentation and replacement of brain tissue such that my consciousness is not interrupted, and eventually allowing me to rewrite my own thought processes to eliminate the inherent flaws in human cognition. Yes, a clone body with downloaded consciousness or a copy of my brain patterns into a computer would satisfy the immortality of my identity in that a distinction without a difference makes no difference; however, I would prefer not to experience death, and so I would prefer solutions where the original "me" doesn't experience such a thing.I don't fear immortality, and I don't think I'd ever really get bored.I don't necessarily "fear" the cessation of existence; I would prefer to continue to exist and will avoid death as long as possible, but non-existence isn't painful, emotionally or physically, so it's not so scary. I do fear the process of death itself, as it doesn't seem to be very pleasant, particularly violent death; and I fear the death of those I care for, because I remain to miss them. I would much rather live in a world without death, so that none of us ever have to say goodbye.

Do you want to die today, Theodoric? Did you want to die yesterday? The day before? Do you anticipate wanting to die tomorrow? Perhaps next Tuesday? Next year? When do you anticipate that you will want to die, assuming that chance and entropy don't make that decision for you?