consciousness-9
Explanation
In this comic, a human excitedly greets alien visitors, thrilled that humanity is not the only conscious life in the universe. The alien immediately corrects him: "Yes you are." Earth is the only planet with consciousness, and it is weird.
The alien explains that consciousness only arises when a mind is made up of thousands of individual modules that are barely on speaking terms with each other. Normally, evolution produces either a singular processor or a harmonious parallel system. But on Earth, the brain evolved as a chaotic collection of competing subsystems, and consciousness emerged as a supervisory layer -- "a whole nother layer that monitors all the shouting and determines the best routes to sex and food."
The alien delivers the comic's best line: "You guys are like a sack of cats on which someone stuck googly eyes on." The human, rather than being offended, declares it "the greatest definition of consciousness I've ever heard." The alien responds that they use this definition "for papers written about you."
The comic engages with real theories of consciousness, particularly the "society of mind" model (Marvin Minsky) and global workspace theory, which describe consciousness as emerging from the integration and arbitration of many competing unconscious processes. The joke is that this is not elegant or admirable -- it is a kludge, a messy accident that the rest of the universe finds bizarre and slightly pitiable.
The "sack of cats with googly eyes" metaphor is a brilliantly irreverent summary of the human condition: we are not unified rational agents, but a bag of warring impulses that somehow coalesced into something that thinks it is a person. The alien's condescending tone throughout -- treating consciousness as humanity's embarrassing quirk rather than its crowning achievement -- inverts the usual narrative of human exceptionalism.