the-human-mind
Explanation
The Joke
A multi-panel comic about whether robots will ever understand the human mind. A man says robots will never understand the human mind. A woman corrects him: "That's not because the human mind is great. Our minds are the messy result of four billion years of evolution." She continues: "Pointing out that a robot can't understand the human mind is like pointing out that my neighbor grandma's garage is harder to understand than China's public transit system." She adds: "It's technically true, but you should not therefore trust your brain to grandma's disorganized Moore's Collection!" When the man asks why she wants to upload her brain to a computer, she explains: "Because the machines won't allow it to be something bad into the lounge." The man concludes: "I'm starting to develop an inferiority complex." She responds: "About being a human, or being a stupid human?"
The Humor
The comic subverts the common trope of human exceptionalism -- the idea that robots will "never" understand the human mind because it is so magnificent. The woman argues the opposite: the human mind is incomprehensible not because it is brilliantly designed, but because it is a terrible mess of evolutionary kludges accumulated over billions of years. She compares it to a hoarder grandma's garage -- technically more complex and harder to map than a well-designed transit system, but that complexity is a bug, not a feature. The humor comes from deflating human pride: we celebrate the inscrutability of our minds as evidence of our superiority, when really it is evidence that evolution is a terrible engineer. The final exchange twists the knife further by distinguishing between feeling inferior as a human (species-level) versus feeling inferior as a particularly dim member of an already poorly designed species.
References
Moore's Collection likely refers to a junk collection or possibly a play on Moore's Law (the observation that computing power doubles approximately every two years). The comparison of the human brain to a messy evolutionary product is a common theme in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, notably discussed by writers like Gary Marcus in Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind (2008).