http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/annals-of-neurology-functional-neuroimaging-of-belief-disbelief-and-uncerta/

I don’t think humanness can be the foundational category of either advantage or responsibility. Species-membership strikes me as clearly a synthetic judgment. Instead, the foundational experience would likely be the face. Not in the transcendental way that Levinas describes it, but in a neurologically pre-recognized way: human experience is structured to seek and imprint faces, which is why that’s the first thing infants learn to do.

So the pre-rational line shouldn’t be a human-inhuman differentiation, but a recognizable-unrecognizable differentiation, with additional cognitive dissonance when a face is liminal and almost-but-not-quite recognizable.

I’d also ask whether it makes sense to talk of deception-aversion in something pre-rational as well. That’s why I tilt towards cognitive dissonance as an explanation: I only worry about deception from someone who is already a candidate for in-group membership. Bridging this uncanny valley seems to be a prerequisite for that candidacy.

I think you’re right that one of the things we’re concerned about in our aversion to things in the uncanny valley is individuation… but not for the same reasons that you cite. That is, I agree with you that one of the things that makes a human being “human” is its singularity (which is why we find twins kind of creepy, like Freud said), but this possiblity is not prohibited to masks or dolls or androids. (You can make a one-of-a-kind doll, too.) So, although I think we are looking for “REAL humanness” and one of our ways of judging that is by individuating (or recognizing individuation), I still think that when we are almost-fooled by a doll/robot/android/whatever, that what inspires our aversion to it is that we were almost fooled. Our aversion is to deception, not because it’s not possible that this particular doll is individuated, but because once we know it is a doll (a simulation, a product of techne, a manufactured thing) then we also know (as you noted) that it could be mass produced, that is, it could “fool” us into thinking that its individuality is really singular. Which, of course, it isn’t.

To that end, I think our aversion to (good or bad) plastic surgery is motivated by the same aversion to deception. The “plastic” in “plastic surgery” indicates that we are contaminating the realms of physis and techne, that we are in danger of taking the unnatural for the natural, the fake for the real, the strange for the familiar.

First, let me remark on this (from you):
So if I’m reading her correctly, just as we begin to worry that we are being deceived, we transition to a set of concerns around our own mortality that are inspired by viewing a human corpse. But that doesn’t seem born out by the principle distinction between animated and unmoving uncanniness, since there’s much more revulsion at seeing an animated near-human robot than in seeing a still one. (Unless we truly do have an abiding fear of zombies….)

If what we are talking about it some kind of implicit/non-reflective measurement of “humanness,” which is what I suggested in my original post, then the bottom of the uncanny valley will be occupied by the things that seem the most “uncannily” “human” to us. If there IS a non-human/human divide intersecting the bottom of the valley, then that means that the MOST “lifelike” (in terms of both appearance and animation) simulation will be the creepiest possible thing on the “nonhuman” side of the bottom of the valley. Something like an almost-perfect android. Despite all of its movement and characteristics, we will still want to say something like, “but it’s not REALLY human.” So what’s just on the other side of that divide? That is, what is the thing about which we say “yes, it’s REALLY human, but an almost infinitely degraded version of the human, only barely what we mean when we say ‘human.’”?

I think that would be a corpse. Non-animated, non-moving, non-breathing… but also NOT a “simulation.”

So the “prinicple distinction between animated and unmoving uncanniness” that you reference is still in play here. Yes, we’re more revulsed by an animated, non-human robot than a still one, because the more “life-like” movement that a robot simulates, the more danger we are in of being deceived by it. But on the other side of the valley (the side leading back “up” to the “real” human), the opposite is true. There, more movement equals more “life” (as opposed to more “life-like”) and hence the LESS a “real” human exhibits this kind of movement (or exhibits it artifically, as we might say would be the case with artificial limbs), the less “fully” human it seems. So, THAT’S why I think the still corpse is at the bottom of the valley, of which we will say “yes, that’s a human, but without almost all of the things that make a human “human,” namely, the movements and expressions of LIFE.” But the “uncanniness” of the corpse is qualitatively different that the uncanniness of the very-lifelike robot, because we have changed the standards of judgment when we traversed the bottom of the valley. It’s like the difference between how we might judge a really good Beatles cover-band and how we might judge the (real) Beatles on a really bad music day. If the standards of those judgments were shared, then we would have to say that the cover-band would win… but they aren’t shared. There’s a fundamental difference between how we think about images and how we think about the real.

More later…