soul-8
Explanation
This comic tackles the philosophical concept of substance dualism -- the idea, most associated with Rene Descartes, that mind and body are fundamentally different kinds of substance, and that consciousness cannot arise from mere physical matter.
The comic opens with a bald man stating he is a substance dualist because "it's just not plausible that brute matter could give rise to mental states." His companion with green hair agrees enthusiastically: "Absolutely." She then launches into describing what substance dualists should believe instead, taking a dramatic sharp intake of breath before delivering an enormous wall of text describing "mind-stuff" that is physically undetectable, indestructible, appeared only when humanity reached its current evolutionary stage, does not interact with the body yet somehow both determines and is affected by actions, is localized to individual people during their lifetimes, and goes to a non-localized undetectable location upon death.
The bald man says he cannot tell if she is entirely serious, and the green-haired woman, now bent over and out of breath from the exertion of the monologue, gasps, "One moment... catch breath... then... talk animal consciousness."
The humor lies in the rhetorical judo: the substance dualist's objection to physicalism is that it seems implausible, but when his own position is spelled out in full, it requires an extraordinary number of ad hoc, unfalsifiable, and mutually contradictory properties. The comic highlights the irony that people who reject materialism for being hard to believe often hold a position that, when fully articulated, is far more baroque and implausible. The physical comedy of the woman being winded from the sheer length of the explanation literalizes the intellectual exhaustion of maintaining so many unsupported commitments at once.