2010-11-21
Explanation
This comic plays on the idea of personal identity and how people change over time. A man claims he's "always been a bit of a geek," but his girlfriend challenges this by using a time machine to summon his 18-year-old self from the past. When the younger version arrives, he turns out to have been mostly playing video games and trying to be cool -- not geeky at all -- exposing the man's nostalgic self-image as a fabrication.
When the man protests that the younger version is "a lie," his girlfriend delivers a cutting philosophical argument: his "notion of self" is the real lie, because identity is not fixed. She points out that in another ten years, she could summon his present-day self and he would hate that version too. She describes him as "a distant echo of your former self with a false sense of importance derived from an incorrect belief in an unbroken stream of consciousness."
The final panel shows the man's son remarking "Wow. Dad was right," followed by a flashback of the father advising, "Son, never date a philosopher with a time machine." The joke is that combining philosophical insight about personal identity with the practical power of time travel creates an unwinnable argument in a relationship.