Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

questions

2024-11-14 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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questions
Votey panel for questions
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Explanation

This comic satirizes the interaction between humans and a hyper-advanced alien intelligence. A group of humans has received a transmission from the "Galactic Ultra-Consciousness" and eagerly asks it all of humanity's big philosophical questions. The alien responds with a long list of error messages for each question: "Result: ill-defined," "Concept underspecified," "Concept ambiguous," "Result: no conclusion possible," "Concept internally contradictory," and so on. The human's reaction is simply "Well, poo."

The joke is that humanity's deepest, most profound questions -- the ones we have agonized over for millennia -- turn out to be, from the perspective of a superior intelligence, simply poorly formulated. The alien does not refuse to answer out of mystery or withholding; it cannot answer because the questions themselves are logically incoherent, ambiguous, or underspecified. This is a nod to a real tradition in analytic philosophy that argues many classic philosophical problems (free will, consciousness, the meaning of life) may be pseudo-problems arising from confused language rather than genuine mysteries. The humor comes from the deflating anticlimax: instead of cosmic revelation, we get what amounts to a compiler error log.

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