drmstream[writing]

Seed Mag­a­zine has a post elab­o­rat­ing on the phe­nom­e­non of the uncanny val­ley, and con­nect­ing the writ­ing of Freud and the gen­e­sis of the con­cept of the uncanny val­ley from Masahiro Mori with the recent work from Asif Ghazanfar.

The hypoth­e­siz­ing about the uncanny value has focused on the premise of human­ness, the essence of nature and the def­i­n­i­tion of death.

Ghaz­an­far rejects all of these hypothe­ses. “What is really going on is much sim­pler,” he says. He believes the uncanny val­ley response occurs because an animal—human or nonhuman—is evo­lu­tion­ar­ily inclined to develop an expec­ta­tion of what mem­bers of its species should look like, a supremely impor­tant skill, as it lets the ani­mal know with whom it can and can­not interact.

The haunt­ing recog­ni­tion seems easy to under­stand: death equals dis­ease and the recog­ni­tion of dis­ease is cru­cial to stay­ing alive; and dis­guise is used by many preda­tors to assault unsus­pect­ing vic­tims. Every species devel­ops recog­ni­tion tools that are ele­men­tal; our nature of human­ness, with its self cog­ni­tion, makes us reflec­tively aware of the sensation.