Digitized Immortality and the Afterlife Fetish: A Dialectical Materialist Critique of Artificial Eschatology

This study uses dialectical materialism as a methodological framework to critically analyze the ethical risks associated with artificial afterlife technologies, including digital consciousness uploading and simulated posthumous avatars. It contends that the mechanical replication of an afterlife is an unethical act of metaphysical speculation since there is no factual evidence supporting the existence or character of such a state. The study reveals how artificial afterlife initiatives fetishize consciousness as a disembodied and transportable entity, commodify death, and detach grieving by drawing on Marxist philosophy and critical theory. It is demonstrated that these systems operate as ideological constructs that propagate religious eschatology inside a capitalist, consumerist framework rather than as scientific advancements. Instead, the article promotes a materialist ethics of mortality that places an emphasis on communal grief, ecological continuity, and collective memory. We can resist digital mystification and reestablish human dignity within the confines of material reality by addressing death as a dialectical juncture within embodied, historical life.