The word uncanny refers to something that is strangely familiar, as opposed to something that is simply

mysterious in some way. There are disagreements about how and why this particular feeling

manifests. Freud thought that the feeling of uncanniness presented us with a mixture of

familiar and uncomfortable, which triggered

unconscious, repressed impulses. Jacques Lacan thought that the uncanny put us in situations

in which we couldn't easily distinguish bad from good and pleasure from displeasure,

which makes us experience anxiety in the presence

of uncanny things, since we're not able to easily put these things into mental boxes.

There's also the related concept of abjection, which is usually defined as the state of being

cast off, and which is interpreted by philosopher and novelist Julia Christiva to describe the subjective sense of horror that an individual experience is when confronted by the breakdown of one's own corporeal reality. In other words, the loss of distinction

between one's self and the other, or the dissolution of the labels or ideas that we use to

define ourselves. This could refer to our tribal or cultural affiliations, our genetic or species affiliations,

or the affiliations we have with tangible reality.

We might feel abjection when confronted with the possibility that we are living within a simulation,

or with the possibility that our ethnic group is more closely related to another, potentially hated, ethnic group than we were always told.

So a sense of abjection is in some ways similar and perhaps even parallel to a sense of the uncanny.

The uncanny valley is a term that was originally coined by the robotics

professor Masahiro Mori in 1970, but it was first translated into English using the actual

words Uncanny Valley in 1978 in a book called Robots, Fact, Fiction, and Prediction, which was written by

Josiah Reichart. Even if you're unfamiliar with the theory of the Uncanny Valley, you've

almost certainly viscerally responded to it at some point in your life. The concept is usually

illustrated with an S-curve plotted on a graph, with the initial curve

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