Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Doom

2021-09-24 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Doom
Votey panel for Doom
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic plays on the question "Is the brain a computer?" A woman asks a man this question, and he answers "Sure, and I can prove it." He then pulls out a floppy disk and says he is going to install Adobe Flash, "disk 1 of 4."

The woman clarifies that she did not mean a literal desktop computer but rather that the brain is a "thing that computes." The man counters that the brain cannot do long division, so it is not a computer. She responds that computing just requires the ability to process at least two states. He then holds up floppy disks and says "dragon balls can compute" (referring to Dragon Ball Z collectibles that have different numbers of stars, thus having multiple states).

The deeper joke is about the imprecision of the analogy "the brain is a computer." Depending on how loosely you define "computer," either almost nothing qualifies (if you mean a literal electronic computer) or almost everything qualifies (if you mean anything that can hold multiple states). The man's absurd literalism and the woman's progressively weakened definitions both highlight that saying "the brain is a computer" is not as meaningful a statement as it first appears. The votey shows someone saying they cannot stop thinking about consciousness, poking fun at how these circular debates about the nature of mind tend to consume people.

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