We like to think that each and every one of us is a unique person. Individuals, irreplaceable; not any one of us could replace the other. Well, that's partially true. None of us could ever do such a thing.
I want you to imagine for a second that you are not yourself. You're someone else. But your job is still to pretend to be yourself. It's not that you get paid to do it. You do it to blend in, or you do it because you get some kind of sick pleasure out of it. If you trick them, if they don't see through the illusion, you win. And if they see through it, you get to laugh, laugh with your crooked smile and eyes-too-wide until they collapse on the floor in painful awe.
The Uncanny Valley is a phenomenon first studied in robotics. A robot that looks totally inhuman is nothing hard to look at. One that manages to look completely human, while unprecedented, would likewise do no harm to the mind. Then there's the stuff between. Things that look just barely not human. We have a visceral response to these things. They look wrong. They aren't supposed to exist.
What's most likely is that, like pareidolia, this psychological event occurs simply as a side-effect of our proficiency at recognizing faces. Another hypothesis is that the uncanny effect is a survival mechanism that encourages us to avoid our own dead. When a person rots, they start to look wrong, and we needed a way to avoid disease well before germs were discovered.
Of course, if you disregard the mainstream science for a moment, it doesn't take long to start to imagine it might be a different kind of survival mechanism. Humans like to think of themselves as the rulers of the universe. Anyone on this board will know that's not true. We know there's more out there. So don't act like I'm crazy for saying it's possible there's something as old as the human mind, something lurking in plain sight, things that like to pretend. It's real. They're real.
