The uncanny eeriness of perfection

The term "Uncanny valley" refers to the emotional response of eeriness we get towards objects which highly, yet imperfectly resemble actual human beings.

There is no discrete, established quantifiable theory to explain it or why it happens but there is some debate around if this stems from a limitation of our technology or something deeper in our psychology. I tend to be in the camp of the latter and think it's not a limitation of our technology.

Too much likeliness makes us uncomfortable because it forces us to confront our relationship between our minds and bodies in a very visceral way. This becomes less of an issue in our digital worlds because we don't have the demand to resemble our true real selves.

Humans see reality through a fictional lens. We are evolved to care more about the stories of ourselves than our reality - and this gets magnified in our created worlds.

With more options to represent ourselves in digital environments our desire to be our "real physical selves" falls to the wayside as we gain the flexibility to explore and play with versions of who we want to be.

As the age-old saying goes  "I'm here live, I am not a cat"