Of course we will want to. I am sure there will be lots of side effects, but almost anything beats dying.
IMHO this is the wrong question to ask. As long as you continue to age, and your body degrades, you'll eventually not object to dying any more, because living isn't much fun.
The much more interesting question is: do you want to age beyond a certain point?
I mean that I don't want my 4 year old to stop ageing, please :-)
So "stop ageing" is only good as long as we have some decent measure of control over it.
(I feel like I'm really stating the obvious here, but I don't know the whole discussion well enough to know if I can assume that obvious stuff is well-understood...)
Someone must have written sci-fi of this.
A brilliant short story by asminov also briefly touches living forever and running out of space as it were.
For me if a population of immortals means a population without children I'm not sure it's such a great idea. I'm concerned about intellectual, cultural and technological ossification and ultimately degeneration without a continually renewing population.
From a moral point of view, I don't buy the idea that death is something horrific to be avoided at all costs. Historically it's generally been accepted that there are things worth dying for, and countless throngs have sacrificed their lives, or at least willingly risked them, for causes they believed in. I'm specifically reminded of the case of a father a few years back that leaped in front of a lorry to push a child to safety, obviously knowing that he was sacrificing his own life to do so.
Human life is precious and valuable, but not infinitely so and it's not obvious to me that an existing life is necessarily more valuable than a potential new one. I don't expect it will be politicaly possible or desirable to suppress life extending treatments and I don't really have any idea how this will all play out, but for me it's not a foregone conclusion that a future in which it is normal to indefinitely extend life is an ideal one.
They had lots of children, overpopulation was not a problem because of huge habitats that hosted billions of individuals (and that were built with relative ease - The Player of Games). Also I don't agree with the intellectual degradation argument, it's just silly in the Culture AGI context.
Whatever the value of life I think it's best for the individual to decide what to do with it. Most would probably euthanasiate after a while anyway. I would very much prefer suicide than a random age related problem, but I don't really have a choice do I?
Natural selection and evolution has no purpose. It does what works best in its environment. If mankind find that having longer and healthier lives benefits its species, we will probably go that way anyway.
Early animals didn't age, nor did they die. Some plants don't age (they still die due to illness or trauma, but not through old age). Even "mortal" animals today are offshoots of a central cell-line that doesn't age (ovi in women get their age reset upon birth then no longer age. Sperm get their age reset upon production. This goes for all animals that age, not just for humans). So you are immortal, in the sense that some of the cells that form part of your body won't age and die like the rest of you.