Ex Machina

Ex Machina
Author: Brian K. Vaughan
Publisher: Titan Publishing Company
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2011-06
Genre: Hundred, Mitchell (Fictitious character)
ISBN: 9780857682727

In this last deluxe EX MACHINA hardcover, Mayor Mitchell Hundred descends into the NYC sewers to learn why he was given the strange powers that helped him become the heroic Great Machine while a powerful new foe reveals a terrifying plan that's been in the works since the series began.

Embodiment and the Inner Life

Embodiment and the Inner Life
Author: Murray Shanahan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2010
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0199226555

To understand the mind and its place in Nature is one of the great intellectual challenges of our time, a challenge that is both scientific and philosophical. How does cognition influence an animal's behaviour? What are its neural underpinnings? How is the inner life of a human being constituted? What are the neural underpinnings of the conscious condition? Embodiment and the Inner Life approaches each of these questions from a scientific standpoint. But it contends that, before we can make progress on them, we have to give up the habit of thinking metaphysically, a habit that creates a fog of philosophical confusion. From this post-reflective point of view, the book argues for an intimate relationship between cognition, sensorimotor embodiment, and the integrative character of the conscious condition. Drawing on insights from psychology, neuroscience, and dynamical systems, it proposes an empirical theory of this three-way relationship whose principles, not being tied to the contingencies of biology or physics, are applicable to the whole space of possible minds in which humans and other animals are included. Embodiment and the Inner Life is one of very few books that provides a properly joined-up theory of consciousness, and will be essential reading for all psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists with an interest in the enduring puzzle of consciousness.

Deus Ex Machina

Deus Ex Machina
Author: Mel Croucher
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2016-04-04
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1783336927

The billion dollar video games industry had to start somewhere, and this is the hilarious, heartbreaking, inside story of how it all began and where it's all headed. And in the middle of it all there was a game hailed as the best ever written. It was called Deus Ex Machina. It was a creative triumph and it was a commercial disaster. Meet the pirates, the nerds, the innovators, the charlatans, the superstars, the winners, the sinners, the good, the bad and the downright ugly. A remarkable story revealed by the founder of the industry himself, with gut-wrenching honesty and merciless humor. If you ever wondered how computer gaming turned us all into willing slaves, you're about to find out in glorious style.

The Coma

The Coma
Author: Alex Garland
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2005-07-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1440628300

When Carl awakens from a coma after being attacked on a subway train, life around him feels unfamiliar, even strange. He arrives at his best friend's house without remembering how he got there; he seems to be having an affair with his secretary, which is pleasant but surprising. He starts to notice distortions in his experience, strange leaps in his perception of time. Is he truly reacting with the outside world, he wonders, or might he be terribly mistaken? So begins a dark psychological drama that raises questions about the the human psyche, dream versus reality, and the boundaries of consciousness. As Carl grapples with his predicament, Alex Garland - author of The Beach and the screenplay for 28 Days Later, plays with conventions and questions our assumptions about the way we exist in the world, even as it draws us into the unsettling and haunting book about a lost suitcase and a forgotten identity.

Exin Ex Machina

Exin Ex Machina
Author: G. S. Jennsen
Publisher: Hypernova Publishing
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2018-06-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

**Exin Ex Machina is a new entry point for the AMARANTHE series--newcomers are welcome** When man and machine are one and the same, there are many crimes but only one sin: psyche-wipe. The secrets it has buried could lead to a civilization's salvation, or to its doom. The Asterion Dominion is at peace with its neighbors and itself. Its citizens enjoy great freedoms and all the luxuries their biosynthetic minds can imagine, design and create. But beneath the idyllic veneer, something is going wrong. People are going wrong, driven to commit inexplicable crimes without motive or purpose. And once imprisoned for those crimes, they simply vanish. Psyche-wiped and dumped in an alley 5 years ago, awakened into a culture where ancestral memories stretch back for millennia, Nika Tescarav's past is a blank canvas. But if whoever erased her did so in the hope of silencing her, they should have tried harder. Someone must speak for the lost. Someone must uncover how and why they became lost. Someone must find the lost. Nika is that someone. ASTERION NOIR 700,000 years ago, the Asterions fled persecution for their pro-synthetic beliefs. In the safe harbor of a distant galaxy, they have evolved into a true biosynthetic race and built a thriving society upon the pillars of personal autonomy, mutual respect and boundless innovation. Now that society is fracturing at the seams. Beneath lies built upon lies, the shocking truth as to why threatens the future of not merely the Asterions, but all life in the universe. Cyberpunk and space opera collide in a thrilling new trilogy from the author of the epic Aurora Rhapsody space opera saga. Enter a world of technological wonders, exotic alien life, enthralling characters, captivating worlds—and a terrifying evil lurking in the void that will shatter it all. Fans of Neuromancer, Blade Runner and Altered Carbon will love this intense, action-packed science fiction noir thriller with a space opera twist. Explorations of artificial intelligence, the value of memories and what it means to be alive intermingle with mysteries, conspiracies, intrigue, rebellion and lost love. * EXIN EX MACHINA is a new entry point for the Amaranthe series and can be read before the Aurora novels. *** AMARANTHE UNIVERSE: --------------------------------------- ~ AURORA RHAPSODY ~ (should be read in order) AURORA RISING TRILOGY #1: STARSHINE (Aurora Rising Book One) #2: VERTIGO (Aurora Rising Book Two) #3: TRANSCENDENCE (Aurora Rising Book Three) AURORA RENEGADES TRILOGY #4: SIDESPACE (Aurora Renegades Book One) #5: DISSONANCE (Aurora Renegades Book Two) #6: ABYSM (Aurora Renegades Book Three) AURORA RESONANT TRILOGY #7: RELATIVITY (Aurora Resonant Book One) #8: RUBICON (Aurora Resonant Book Two) #9: REQUIEM (Aurora Resonant Book Three) #10: SHORT STORIES OF AURORA RHAPSODY (can be read at any time) ~ ASTERION NOIR TRILOGY ~ (a new entry point for the series - can be read before Aurora Rhapsody) #11: EXIN EX MACHINA (Asterion Noir Book 1) #12: OF A DARKER VOID (Asterion Noir Book 2) #13: THE STARS LIKE GODS (Asterion Noir Book 3) ~ RIVEN WORLDS ~ (should be read after Aurora Rhapsody and Asterion Noir) #14: CONTINUUM (Riven Worlds Book One) #15: INVERSION (Riven Worlds Book Two) #16: ECHO RIFT (Riven Worlds Book Three) #17: ALL OUR TOMORROWS (Riven Worlds Book Four) #18: CHAOTICA (Riven Worlds Book Five) #19: DUALITY (Riven Worlds Book Six) ~ COSMIC SHORES ~ (a new entry point for the series - each book can be read at any time and without reading any of the other books) #20: MEDUSA FALLING (A Cosmic Shores Novel) #21: THE THIEF (A Cosmic Shores Novel)

Brain Jack

Brain Jack
Author: Brian Falkner
Publisher: Ember
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2011-08-09
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0375843671

A Top Ten YALSA Pick for Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults! Fans of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and M. T. Anderson's Feed will love this high-octane cyber thriller. In a dystopian near-future, neuro-headsets have replaced computer keyboards. Just slip on a headset, and it's the Internet at the speed of thought. For teen hacker Sam Wilson, a headset is a must. But as he masters the new technology, he has a terrifying realization. If anything on his computer is vulnerable to an attack, what happens when his mind is linked to the system? Could consciousness itself be hacked? Brian Falkner, author of The Tomorrow Code and The Project, delivers an action-packed and thought-provoking sci-fi thriller in which logging on to a computer could mean the difference between life and death.

Lingua Ex Machina

Lingua Ex Machina
Author: William H. Calvin
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780262531986

A neuroscientist and a linguist show how evolution could have given rise to structured language. A machine for language? Certainly, say the neurophysiologists, busy studying the language specializations of the human brain and trying to identify their evolutionary antecedents. Linguists such as Noam Chomsky talk about machinelike "modules" in the brain for syntax, arguing that language is more an instinct (a complex behavior triggered by simple environmental stimuli) than an acquired skill like riding a bicycle. But structured language presents the same evolutionary problems as feathered forelimbs for flight: you need a lot of specializations to fly even a little bit. How do you get them, if evolution has no foresight and the intermediate stages do not have intermediate payoffs? Some say that the Darwinian scheme for gradual species self-improvement cannot explain our most valued human capability, the one that sets us so far above the apes, language itself. William Calvin and Derek Bickerton suggest that other evolutionary developments, not directly related to language, allowed language to evolve in a way that eventually promoted a Chomskian syntax. They compare these intermediate behaviors to the curb-cuts originally intended for wheelchair users. Their usefulness was soon discovered by users of strollers, shopping carts, rollerblades, and so on. The authors argue that reciprocal altruism and ballistic movement planning were "curb-cuts" that indirectly promoted the formation of structured language. Written in the form of a dialogue set in Bellagio, Italy, Lingua ex Machina presents an engaging challenge to those who view the human capacity for language as a winner-take-all war between Chomsky and Darwin.

The Beach

The Beach
Author: Alex Garland
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2005-07-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101657502

The irresistible novel that was adapted into a major motion picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The Khao San Road, Bangkok -- first stop for the hordes of rootless young Westerners traveling in Southeast Asia. On Richard's first night there, in a low-budget guest house, a fellow traveler slashes his wrists, bequeathing to Richard a meticulously drawn map to "the Beach." The Beach, as Richard has come to learn, is the subject of a legend among young travelers in Asia: a lagoon hidden from the sea, with white sand and coral gardens, freshwater falls surrounded by jungle, plants untouched for a thousand years. There, it is rumored, a carefully selected international few have settled in a communal Eden. Haunted by the figure of Mr. Duck -- the name by which the Thai police have identified the dead man -- and his own obsession with Vietnam movies, Richard sets off with a young French couple to an island hidden away in an archipelago forbidden to tourists. They discover the Beach, and it is as beautiful and idyllic as it is reputed to be. Yet over time it becomes clear that Beach culture, as Richard calls it, has troubling, even deadly, undercurrents. Spellbinding and hallucinogenic, The Beach by Alex Garland -- both a national bestseller and his debut -- is a highly accomplished and suspenseful novel that fixates on a generation in their twenties, who, burdened with the legacy of the preceding generation and saturated by popular culture, long for an unruined landscape, but find it difficult to experience the world firsthand.

Deus Ex Machina

Deus Ex Machina
Author: Jennifer Pilch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780932716842

Poetry. Winner of the 2014 Kelsey Street Press FIRSTS Contest. "Jennifer Pilch's DEUS EX MACHINA pulls the ache from a fractured century, stitching the bloom past artifice into an urgent, prismatic form unlike any we have seen. Each voice 'risks/transforms night' into 'a blossom that punctures that blots.' A book like this, assembled from music and ruin and light, is rare and necessary." Joshua Poteat "In DEUS EX MACHINA, Jennifer Pilch crashes classical tragedy into melodrama, foregrounding the parameters of representation in an analog of early photography's impact. With lush language, she explores the photograph's obviating violence, focusing on the 'taken' part of the picture and the lens's seizure of sensory mechanics. Working at varying distances from the stage, the page, and the photographic image, her historical characters successively worry the line between romance and fidelity, presence and preservation, and contend with a colonizing mode of 'perception stuck to where there's light.'" Kate Colby"

Robert Lepage / Ex Machina

Robert Lepage / Ex Machina
Author: James Reynolds
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2019-02-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 147427658X

Robert Lepage/Ex Machina: Revolutions in Theatrical Space provides an ideal introduction to one of our most innovative companies – and a much-needed and timely reappraisal of Lepage's oeuvre. International, interdisciplinary and intercultural to the core, Ex Machina have negotiated some of the most complex creative and cultural challenges of our time. This book maps the story of that journey by analysing the full spectrum of their richly varied work. Through a comprehensive historiography of productions since 1994, Robert Lepage/Ex Machina offers a detailed picture of the relationship between director and company, while connecting Ex Machina to culturally specific features of Québec, and its theatre. This book reveals for the first time how overlooked aspects of creativity and culture shaped the company's early work, while installing a dynamic interplay between director and company that would spark a unique and ongoing evolution of praxis. Central to this re-evaluation of practice is the book's identification of an architectural aesthetic at the heart of Ex Machina's work, an aesthetic which provides its artistic and political centres of gravity. Moreover, this architectural aesthetic powers the emergence of concrete narrative as a new and distinctive mode of theatrical storytelling – uniting story and space, body and technology, content and form – and demanding that we discover the politics of these performances in the energetic gestures of theatre design, and space itself. Drawing on extensive interviews with Lepage, Ex Machina personnel and collaborative partners, Robert Lepage/Ex Machina calls upon us to revise both our creative and critical perceptions of this vital and distinctive practice.