neurons
Explanation
This comic is a multi-panel meditation on the difficulty of understanding the human brain. It begins with someone asking if we will ever understand the brain, and a scientist explaining that even with huge effort, we can only simulate the 302-neuron brain of the roundworm C. elegans. The scientist then speculates that one day we might build a computer to simulate the brain's 86 billion neurons -- but it would be so complex we could not understand it either.
The joke builds to a philosophical punchline. The scientist notes that we already use crude shorthand to describe our own mental lives ("she was acting weird" or "he's grouchy"), suggesting we do not really understand even ourselves. Then comes the kicker: perhaps alien beings could understand us completely, "but only if they're so fundamentally unlike us that they don't care about us." The final panel has someone remark "This is how religions start" -- pointing out that the comic has essentially re-derived the concept of an omniscient but indifferent god through neuroscience reasoning. The humor lies in the circularity: scientific inquiry about consciousness loops back around to the same existential conclusions that religion reached millennia ago.