i know that "mechs as bodies" is very much a thing, and a lot of media that does this (armored core, hwbm, etc) turns it all the way up to hyperreality with the mechs being directly wired into the pilot's body, but something interesting is that this isn't even necessary. anyone who's driven the same car often enough knows that eventually, your proprioception kind of extends to the car as well, just through the medium of your control of the wheel and your feet on the floor. when i'm parallel parking, i'm going much less from visual cues or from procedural memory than from the fact that i can "feel" where the back wheels of the car are, almost like they were connected to me. it's an illusion, but a strong and reliable one, like in those studies where they get a participant to identify an artificial hand as their own hand. the boundary of what your brain considers to be a part of your body is actually highly permeable
- they/them
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in reply to @Rhiannon's post:
I always figured it's to allow for more direct control and feedback. You might know your car extremely well, but the information you have is limited. You can't, for example, feel that the turn signal is out, or the right rear fender just got hit by a small stone and scratched. You might notice the engine performance is slightly less, but you can't immediately know that it's because the fuel pump is a little worn out.
These things aren't super important for a car, but for a military robot, they could be. I've actually often pondered the idea of an airplane with "skin" that can immediately report to pilots/maintenance any slight issues with its frame before they become a problem, even before they're noticeable.
You're also limited in how you can control the car, not only by your reaction time, but also by physical movement. You can only turn the wheel so fast, and it takes a second to remember where a rarely-used control is, locate it in 3D space, and activate it. Again not really important for cars, but in combat, in a vehicle that might have dozens of controls, those fractions of a second can really matter.
What I imagine for these fictional scenarios is that the first mechs were a lot like cars and planes - you controlled them with your hands, feet, voice etc, and after a few hundred hours in the cockpit, it felt so natural that it was like an extension of your own body. But when someone found a way to wire it directly into their brain, bypassing the response time involved with physically moving a control or recognizing what exactly a warning light meant, it gave them a slight advantage, which proved to be actually very significant.
There's also the advantage that you don't have to worry about a physical control breaking or being bumped accidentally.
i remember having this feeling for the first time very strongly when i went kayaking for the first time-- at the beginning, it was very much Something Else, but a few hours in, i felt deeply connected to it & how we moved together
There has to be something to a phantom limb extending to an entire machine right?
This also extends to mobility aids like canes, in my experience.
I remember reading in Scott McCloud's 'Understanding Comics' a section talking about this, how when someone rear-ends you your instinct is to go 'They hit me', not 'They hit my car' (I'm sure some people say the latter but y'know). There was also some study done - I can't remember exactly where - that said that when you're using a tool, the brain interprets the tool as a literal extension of your body. Brains are weird!
When my car got rear-ended hard enough to be a total loss, I literally went through a grieving process. It took me longer than it normally does to get used to the replacement car, because I was still expecting the old car, like a phantom limb.