States of Repulsion

Recently, a medical student I know posed a question about the undead. I can safely say that I understand the question, and also that I think I know the answer. That is, I am certain that I think I know the answer, but I am not so certain that I actually know the answer. You will immediately see the gap that I am using as a hedge.

His question was, "I wonder why we have such a deep seated primal fear about zombies. Is it an innate instinct to fear the Mindless Masses that humans can become in mobs?"

I think that part of it comes from the 'Uncanny Valley', that zone of human perception at which the close-to-known becomes the repulsive unknown. The unknown here is what the Hierophant would call das Unheimliche, that sensation of looking at the familiar and suddenly recognizing that it is not.

Here's an experiment you can try. I've done it many times before, and the capacity to successfully carry it out is a mark of the ability to successfully bisociate — that is, to bridge two similar states while recognizing they are not at all the same. It is a fundamental component of humour (and this concept was also part of my education thesis for the postgrad diploma in education, heh heh).

The experiment goes like this. Hold out your hand, palm down, slightly to one side. Stare at it so that almost your entire visual field is filled by the hand, with its fingers and extending as far back as your wrist. At some point, you will realise that your hand looks strange and unfamiliar. You may even begin to think of it as an alien structure. When you reach this stage, congratulate yourself for two things. You have achieved bisociational perspective, and you have also realised why knowing something as well as the back of your hand is not an easy thing.

But back to the 'Uncanny Valley'. Look at this graph, proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. Not everyone agrees with it, but it explains why animated films like The Polar Express met with such mixed reactions.

Now compare that graph to this one. Although this one is actually a graph of the interaction between two hydrogen atoms that are dancing into a covalent bond, there are obvious similarities. In the case of the robot (or zombie, which should be similar — haha), perfect similarity to a human would result in most normal affective response; in the case of the atoms, perfect similarity (i.e. overlap) causes most repulsion (since two atoms can't occupy the same space). It turns out that there are many such similar phenomena in the universe.