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Posts tagged: embodiment

ninjaruski:

There are things you can’t fight - acts of God. You see a hurricane coming, you get out of the way. But when you’re in a Jaeger, you can finally fight the hurricane. You can win.

Beyond connecting with the mind of another pilot, one of the most interesting aspects of piloting a Jaege, for me, was the way in which the pilots become embodied in the Jaeger as distinct consciousnesses connected in an interdependent bridge. As depicted in the film and the source material (see the quote from the novel above), the neural bridge acts to connect the two pilots together so that they function as a single individual within the Jaeger. So, to me, when Raleigh says “when you’re in a Jaeger,” I believes he literally means “in,“ as in inhabiting the Jaeger as if it was his own body. So, this is the thing that I want to explore: the two Jaeger pilots as embodied in the Jaeger itself.

So, what is embodiment? In philosophy, embodiment is the idea that the way in which we inhabit our bodies has an effect on the development of our consciousness. The differences in our bodies (the “body” in “embodiment") make a massive difference in the way in which we experience and interact with the world, hence, even Identical twins do not form identical personalities because their modes of embodiment are different. To this end, the concept of embodiment, or “cognitive embodiment,“ treats the mind and the body as interdependent upon one another: if an individual had a different body, their experience and consciousness would be accordingly different.

So, before taking the brief sketch of embodiment and applying it to the Jaeger itself, we need to talk about the neural drift. The quote above gives a first person look at what it is to be in the drift with someone else: there are two individual connected as an organic whole, distinct yet connected. When Raleigh makes a motion, Mako completes it; where he ends, she begins. To this end, Raleigh and Mako think of themselves as both subject and object: Raleigh can see the end of his connection and the beginning of hers, and Mako can see the end of her connection and the beginning of his, yet neither moves without the other. That is to say, any action taken while in the neural bridge by one pilot, is an action taken by the other pilot as well, as if there was no distinction between the two.

Now, taking the bridged individuals as the “mind,” we can look at the Jaeger itself as the body. The supplemental material discussing piloting a Jaeger describes the experience as the bridged pilots moving the Jaeger as it it were their own body. We can see a bit of this happening in the gifs above: when Raleigh and Mako take a fighting stance, Gipsy Danger mirrors the motion, as if it were their own body. Sharing the neural load, the two pilots inhabit Gipsy, not like a pilot flying an aircraft, or even a motorcyclist riding his bike, but as a mind within a body, with all of the pitfalls that apply.

Here is where the discussion gets interesting: embodied consciousness typically assumes that the consciousness grows with the body. Again, in the brief sketch offered above, our minds would not be the same minds were we embodied in a different body. For Jaegers, the connection is close, but not as individualized: the movie makes a point that the Jaegers must be calibrated for their pilots before the synchronization can take place. That is, the Jaegers must become the bodies for their pilots, they must be made individual for each of their pilots through a process of calibration so that the mind can inhabit the body as if it were born with it. On this point, I don’t see a problem for thinking about the pilots as becoming embodied within the Jaeger, but it does introduce the notion that the embodiment will be different for different pilots.

The clearest visual evidence for this is with Gipsy Danger, as presented in the gifs above. When Gipsy is calibrated for Raleigh and Yancy, the body language is almost totally different: Gipsy moves with an arrogant, aggressive swagger, she fights more like a prize fighter, and there is more “power" in her strikes. We can view this as the blending of Yancy and Raleigh’s minds (including their fighting styles) being embodied within Gipsy: one of the more interesting things is the way that Gipsy’s swagger is mirrored in the Beckett boys when the audience is introduced to them.

On the other hand, when Mako and Raleigh are embodied in Gipsy, there exists an edge of aggression in her movements, however, this appears to be tempered by Mako’s precision. Her strikes have little in the way of wasted motion, and each has a determined goal beyond smashing into the particular Kaiju.Gipsy’s walk, while it possesses a little bit of Raleigh’s swagger, it is more of a purposive, determined stride than it is a challenge issued through body language.

Further, the distinction in their embodiment (the way they inhabit their body) comes out in the stances they adopt: In the above gif, Mako/Raleigh embodied in Gipsy adopts a combat stance that is more in line with what we see out of MMA fighters: gone are the double handed overhead strikes, replaced with a more conservative defensive stance that allows for grappling and close-in fighting. On the other hand, Yancy/Raleigh seemed to prefer a more aggressive stance favored by boxers, keeping Gipsy’s hands closer to the body and utilizing more “power" shots.

We may chalk the distinction in the stances to a different composition of the bridged “mind" that inhabits the Jaeger: the Beckett brothers were more rash, more aggressive in their combat styles, as evidenced by their actions in Alaska. Against this, Raleigh and Mako exhibit an aggression tempered by Mako’s precision: they waste little time with their combat, employing quick, precise strikes designed to take down the Kaiju as quickly as possible.

To this end, no Jaeger will be the same when it embodies different pilots: as the bridged pilots literally become the Jaeger they operate, and the bridge joins the individuals, a change in any of the individuals would result in a change in the Jaeger itself. Further, it seems to be the case that one pair of pilots is attached to a single Jaeger at a time, and that Jaeger is calibrated for those pilots. To this end, the Jaeger itself will be different depending upon who is embodied within the Jaeger. Thus, I think “piloting" is a bad way to talk about what happens to individuals connected to a Jaeger: “becoming" or “embodying" the Jaeger is a more apt description.

Also, credit goes to whomever captured the gifs and the text from the novelization.