2012-07-24
Explanation
This comic explores the philosophical question of whether robots can have souls through a darkly funny afterlife scenario. A man arrives in heaven and asks if his wife will be there. God (or Saint Peter) tells him no, because he married a robot and robots don't have souls. God dismisses robots as "pointless mechanistic binary storage systems." However, the man points out that a human being is a "meaningful mechanistic quaternary information storage system" -- a reference to DNA, which uses four base pairs (quaternary) to store genetic information. God essentially concedes the point, calling the man's wife "just a machine."
The twist ending shows the wife arriving in a separate robot afterlife, asking for her husband, and being told dismissively: "The one made of meat? Are you serious?" This mirrors the prejudice from the first half but reverses it -- in the robot afterlife, biological beings are the ones viewed as unworthy. The comic cleverly highlights the philosophical problem of drawing a sharp line between biological and artificial intelligence. If the distinction between a robot and a human is merely the storage medium (binary vs. quaternary), then the bias against robots having souls seems arbitrary. The parallel afterlife scenes suggest that any substrate can develop chauvinism about the other, making the whole debate look absurd.