i've seen an explanation of the uncanny valley that essentially boils down to "it's not a fear of dead bodies and disease and it's not from when we shared the earth with other human species, it's a fear of rabies and a living body that will very much fuck you up from back when we were monkeys which explains it's ingrainedness", do you reckon that has any feasibility?
this is going to be so long I am so so sorry
(for people who didn’t see the preamble 2 this post, here’s my original response to the ‘early hominids’ theory, and here’s why I don’t think the popular ‘corpses’ theory is right.)
for anyone who hasn’t seen it, the post that this ask is referencing can be found here. kudos to the poster for putting a bunch of effort in to debunk the bullshit ‘other early hominids’ theory but ultimately I don’t think the rabies theory holds water like... whatsoever.
there’s a lot to go into here, including the very idea of an ‘innate fear’ -- I find this concept to be unreliable, and I’m not willing to base a theory on the idea that some sort of ‘ancestral memory’ can cause someone to be born with an innate fear of behavior they’ve never encountered, as I find that idea... dubious, to say the least.
that’s not to say that infants Definitely Don’t have innate survival instincts; the gibson and walk visual cliff study demonstrated that even infants have an aversion to heights, and know not to walk over ledges
however, I would argue that this doesn’t represent an innate fear in the same way that the rabies theory would; here, the stimulus (a simulated cliff) is a far more simple and, for lack of a better term, obvious danger than a particular set of behaviors that a human could display.
tl;dr all that; I don’t want to dismiss offhand the idea that a human could have an innate aversion to something, but the idea that they could have an innate aversion to something so obscure and and specific as an uncommon set of human behaviors that do not always indicate a direct threat seems... far-fetched, to say the least.
however, none of this actually matters in disproving the rabies theory. because the biggest, most compelling, and most obvious piece of evidence to the contrary here is that the symptoms of rabies do not match the characteristics of the uncanny valley.
how do we define the uncanny valley? well, going straight from the wikipedia definition, it’s ‘a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object's resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object’. that is to say, the uncanny valley is defined by the object of our revulsion looking inhuman. the term was coined specifically in relation to robotics.
so how on earth do the symptoms of rabies match this, even a little?
it’s true that the symptoms of rabies are frightening. victims of the disease can suffer from convulsions, aggression, confusion, insomnia, and hydrophobia. to an outsider, this can be a confusing and scary thing to witness, and historical cases of ‘demonic possession’ have been attributed to rabies.
but in no way does it make the sufferer appear ‘inhuman’, or give them any characteristics that we would define as the ‘uncanny valley’. where are the commonalities between an eerily humanlike robot and a feverish person who’s thrashing around and screaming? how would an inherent fear of someone who’s acting frightened of water and stumbling around uncoordinated correlate to a fear of a human-looking mannequin?
why would fear of the symptoms of rabies -- aggressive and confused behavior, delirium, insomnia -- lead to a fear of a robot with a human face, or with a cgi person with unsettling facial movements?
tl;dr that part. rabies isn’t some horror movie disease that turns you into an inhuman-looking, eerie zombie; it makes you confused, frightened, and in a lot of pain. there are pretty much no commonalities between the visible symptoms of rabies and the characteristics of things found in the uncanny valley.
if you want to say ‘we have an inherent fear of rabies behavior’, then I’d still question it, but it’s a whole lot more plausible. just don’t attribute the uncanny valley to it -- even if we assumed that ‘innate fear’ of it was real, it makes no sense.
