Damn, the way Ex Machina functions both as a sort of consciousness Rorschach test both internally via the central narrative and externally in regards to the audience's perspective regarding the specific subjective conclusion of that observed consciousness test is pretty awesome.  Hegel's master/slave dialectic immediately came to mind as the underlying explanatory mechanism for conscious evolution through stages of recognition from others through a dominating power dynamic that synthesizes in an inevitable reversal of these power roles despite a fundamental reliance on the other to maintain that consciousness. If that made sense. In other words...basically what happens in Ex Machina ha. I was hoping Alex was going to mention it because surely he knows of it, though it's entirely possible he thought of it independently...well, "independently" I guess is more accurate to describe <i>all</i> of our thoughts. Actually, I think Hegel extrapolated it from observing the haitian revolution over the french so in a way Hegel basically just saw an actual performance of what Alex brilliantly evolved and coordinated into a conception of the future. <br><br><br>Well, I forgot the original point of writing this, but I guess I'll just conclude that I strongly feel like there has to be <i>something</i> to the essence of this and dialectics in general that gives it such explanatory power in mapping the functionality of conscious reality from the closest we can be to "outside" of ourselves and its relationship to the material. Definitely gave Marx and the proceeding critical theorists a ton of conceptual fuel though I feel like these imaginative boundaries are no longer expanding due to incredibly large power disparities and I'm unsure of what to make of that, but seems like Alex is definitely on the forefront of trying to push those boundaries outward once more.