understanding
Explanation
The Joke
A person asks a glowing cosmic entity (representing the universe) what it is made of. The entity says "Oh yeah, this is awkward..." and then proceeds to explain a series of humbling facts about human understanding:
- Would it really surprise you to know that your vocabulary is approximately 0.000something percent of the history of the universe's operations?
- Humans can only conceptualize about six to nine things at a single time, and even only in great abstraction.
- Approximately 4% of available understanding in the universe would, according to biologists, kill you if you processed it at once (or something to that effect -- the panels describe human cognitive limits).
- The greatest human thinkers get to maybe 1 in 10^17 of full comprehension, and most of those people never breed.
- Organisms like the entity can conceive of up to 10,000 things in their fullness -- not a single amount of which a human could understand over their lifetime.
The entity describes itself as "v-shaped" and made of something humans would describe as being both "dusty" and like being "in the crust." A child watching says "Please stop, this is embarrassing."
The Humor
The comic humorously illustrates the likely reality that humans are profoundly unequipped to understand the true nature of the universe. Rather than presenting the universe as something mysterious but ultimately comprehensible (as popular science often implies), the comic suggests that human cognition is so limited relative to the complexity of reality that any attempt at understanding is almost comically inadequate.
The humor comes from the escalating awkwardness: the universe is not trying to be mean, it is just honestly explaining why the question cannot really be answered in terms humans can grasp. It is like asking an ant to understand calculus -- the limitation is not in the explanation but in the capacity of the listener. The child asking the universe to stop because it is "embarrassing" captures the feeling of existential humiliation that comes from confronting genuine cognitive limits.
References
- Working memory capacity: Cognitive psychology research (notably by George Miller, 1956) established that humans can hold roughly 7 plus or minus 2 items in working memory at once, which the comic references.
- Observable universe: The comic touches on the idea that the vast majority of the universe (including dark matter and dark energy, making up roughly 96% of its content) is something humans cannot directly perceive or intuitively understand.