Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic is an extended philosophical meditation on why people dislike math, using the metaphor of a fungus to explain mathematical reality.

The comic opens with the question: "Why do people hate math?" One character suggests: "Jealousy." Another explains at length: "Math is substrate-independent. It's a pattern that exists independent of any material thing. You can destroy every math book, you can eliminate every mathematician, but Euler's identity abides. True general learning will inevitably arrive at things we know about, impossible beyond verification."

The middle section introduces a metaphor: "Now, take a fungus -- a pattern among a huge network. The pattern doesn't need any particular part of the network. If one piece dies, the fungus persists. You can't imagine the fungus's viewpoint because the body is its self." This parallels math: mathematical truths don't depend on any particular physical instantiation, just as a fungus doesn't depend on any particular part of its network.

The comic continues: "The problem for humans is that there are patterns -- mathematical truths -- that are embedded in other patterns. These patterns don't care about you. They don't even know you exist. It's not that they're hostile. It's just that, like the fungus, the body is immaterial."

The final panels deliver the punchline. The philosophical character concludes: "So there's learning math versus meat-beings learning math. Now think: every kid's first introduction to the subject is long division." The other character responds: "Thoughtful. Very yeah."

The joke is that after this grand, sweeping philosophical explanation of math as an ethereal, substrate-independent truth -- a cosmic fungus of pure pattern -- the comic lands on the mundane observation that children's first encounter with this transcendent reality is... long division, one of the most tedious and soul-crushing procedures in elementary education. The comic suggests that the reason people hate math isn't philosophical at all; it's that the educational system introduces an awe-inspiring subject through its most boring and mechanical procedure.