SMBC: Consciousness Is Just a Bandwidth Issue With 4,000 Agents

Description

An eight-panel SMBC webcomic by Zach Weinersmith with maroon backgrounds. A man asks God (a yellow speech bubble from above): "God, why do we have consciousness?" God replies "It's a bandwidth issue," then explains: "Your brain is made up of like 4,000 competing agents because that's the only way to make sense of all the input data," "But you can't have your 4,000 agents talk to another human brain. All the agents' work has to be compressed down to a sound wave," "So you had to evolve another agent who receives the judgment of the brain parliament, then makes the mouth say something like 'I am sad.'" God declares "That's you!" to a tiny shrinking figure, adds "Telepathic species don't bother with consciousness because they have higher bandwidth," and concludes "The real mystery is why 'you' think your disastrously flawed perception of reality is interesting enough to rise to the level of a philosophical mystery." Final black panel: the man says "I am sad." and God answers "Good job buddy!" Footer shows patreon.com/zachweinersmith and smbc-comics.com. Resonates with engineers as a perfect analogy for multi-agent systems, message compression, and lossy serialization between distributed nodes