2011-09-02
Explanation
This comic presents a biological and philosophical meditation on personal identity. It begins with the common intuition that you are "a single unified life form," then systematically deconstructs that idea. You are actually an agreement between hundreds of trillions of tiny cells, each of which participates in billions of molecular "parliaments" (biochemical signaling pathways) that operate entirely without your conscious awareness.
The joke escalates through increasingly absurd personifications of these biological processes. Histamine receptors hold a parliament declaring war on cat dander. Facial skin cells debate whether they are producing enough oil. These small parliaments form into larger ones, mirroring the fractal nature of biological organization. The punchline drives the point home: "you" are not the executive authority of your body but merely an arbiter between competing biological interests that are often at odds -- illustrated by a man's conscious mind arguing with his genitals, whose autonomous decisions once required the immune system to "clean up your mess for six months." The comic humorously captures the tension between our sense of unified selfhood and the messy biological reality underneath.