conscious-5
Explanation
The comic is a philosophical dialogue about consciousness, structured as a conversation between two characters -- one appears to be God or a cosmic entity (shown as a glowing figure), and the other is a human.
The entity begins by asking "What is consciousness?" and the human responds with "Why, humans are boring." The entity then launches into a lengthy technical explanation: consciousness is "just a definition thing," describing it as when a system can examine itself and make inferences -- essentially saying "you gotta include stuff that really doesn't seem conscious, like a program in a play room."
The human tries to counter: "You can scale up to saying 'I'm in this universe, processing data,'" to which the entity responds that you can also get more specific and say it's "subjective experience" but that doesn't help because "anything with a brain has it," which is "mostly gossipy housewives discussing food on a beach." The entity explains there are perspectives from which consciousness is rare and others from which it is everywhere, mentioning names like "Jerry and Bill and nobody else."
The human says "Thanks God, but I think you're missing the point." The entity asks if consciousness is "shorthand for 'I want a thing, maybe eat it, then go play video games and feel shame?'" The final panels reveal the entity saying "I've been running heaven for 9 billion years and nobody's ever asked me that," and concluding with: "Evolution is a bad teacher sometimes, but the important thing is you're learning."
The comic satirizes the difficulty of defining consciousness by having even an omniscient being struggle with it. Each attempt to pin down what consciousness "is" either becomes so broad it includes everything or so narrow it excludes most of what we care about. The humor lies in the frustrated circularity of the conversation -- God, who presumably should know the answer, keeps offering definitions that are either uselessly technical or absurdly reductive (boiling human consciousness down to wanting food, playing video games, and feeling shame). The punchline -- that no one in 9 billion years of running heaven has ever asked -- suggests that consciousness may be one of those questions that only makes sense from inside the experience itself, and that even the creator finds it more annoying than enlightening.