Body Without a Soul: An Ontological Inquiry into Digital Immortality

Digital immortality attempts to reconstruct personality simulacra through data; its ontology of "disembodiment" severs the primordial connection between consciousness and embodied perception, reducing life to computable information. Existentially, it dissolves, through a delusory fantasy of eternity, the authenticity and resoluteness of "being-toward-death" as revealed by Heidegger. Ethically, digital memorialization alienates the mourning mechanisms of the living, while digital immortality objectifies the dignity of the deceased into data capital; together they exacerbate social injustice based on technological privilege, producing a class rupture between "digital immortality" and "digital ephemerality." This paper undertakes a dual ontological and ethical examination of the presupposition of "disembodiment," and further proposes...