Thought
Explanation
The Joke
This is a longer philosophical comic featuring two characters — one with dark skin and curly hair, and one with lighter skin and glasses — having a deep conversation about whether computers can think. The dialogue proceeds through a logical argument:
The first character asks: "Do you think computers can think?" and the second responds: "Yes, like everything else." The first character then builds an argument step by step: Take 100 coins and arrange them into a system where you and the coins agree on a meaning — now you have "thought" of a number in binary. Take another 200 coins and you can add two numbers together, producing a new number registered in the coins. "You can do this without understanding anything other than two rules about adding and carrying, never knowing the numbers you added or the result you got."
The argument escalates: "So either we arrived at a solution with no thinking at all, or the coins themselves were thinking." Then: "Once you accept that, it's clear that computations are happening everywhere all the time. When you walk, you're causing a computation in the ground. When you breathe, you're causing a computation in the air."
The second character objects: "Okay, the whole universe thinks all the time, but it doesn't think about whether it's thinking." The first character responds: "Right! Humans think about whether we're thinking and then conclude nothing else is doing the same!" The second character then says: "Everything thinking what makes humans special is also come to incorrect—" and catches themselves: "See, this is a perfect example." The second character has inadvertently demonstrated the point by thinking about thinking and getting confused in the process.
The Humor
The comic is a gradually escalating philosophical argument that leads the reader through what seems like a rigorous chain of logic to an absurd conclusion: everything in the universe is "thinking" all the time. The final punchline is a meta-joke where the character trying to object to this conclusion ends up tripping over their own words — their attempt to think about thinking causes their brain to malfunction, perfectly illustrating the first character's point about the limitations of metacognition. The humor is characteristically SMBC: it takes a legitimate philosophical question seriously enough to build a real argument, then punctures it with a human moment of confusion.
References
The comic engages with several real philosophical and computational concepts. The coin-based binary addition is a genuine demonstration of how simple physical systems can perform computation (related to the concept of a Turing machine). The idea that computation is substrate-independent and happens everywhere in nature connects to pancomputationalism, a view associated with thinkers like John Wheeler ("it from bit") and Stephen Wolfram. The question of whether mere computation constitutes "thinking" relates to John Searle's Chinese Room argument and debates about strong vs. weak AI. The comic also touches on the hard problem of consciousness — specifically, what makes human metacognition (thinking about thinking) special, if anything.