pain-3
Explanation
This comic uses the debate about animal consciousness and pain to satirize how humans rationalize unethical behavior.
A person asks God "Why am I here?" God explains: "This is an experiment to see if humans can feel pain." A second divine figure adds: "If they do, it'd be unethical for us to eat them, but they're sooo delicious."
The human responds indignantly: "Obviously we feel pain." But God dismisses this: "A bunch of electrical signals isn't REAL pain."
The comic inverts the real-world debate about animal sentience. In our world, humans are the ones who question whether animals truly feel pain, often using reductive arguments ("it's just nerve signals, not real suffering") to justify eating them. Here, higher beings apply the exact same logic to humans, and the absurdity becomes immediately apparent.
The joke works because the human's frustration at having their pain dismissed mirrors exactly what animals might "feel" when humans make the same argument about them. Weinersmith highlights the self-serving nature of the reasoning: the beings conducting the experiment have already decided they want to eat humans ("they're sooo delicious") and are looking for a justification, not genuinely investigating the question. The dismissal of "electrical signals" as not being "real" pain satirizes the philosophical goalpost-moving that occurs whenever evidence of animal suffering becomes inconvenient for human dietary preferences.