Existential Comics

21 Apr 2025 19:30

Aristotle: the First Nerd - Existential Comics

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14 Apr 2025 19:30

"I was with Einstein last night, and let's just say he understood a thing or two about how long it takes for two separate bodies interact in space and time."

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07 Apr 2025 18:30

Wittgenstein: "what if Metaphysics was stupid and this was all a huge waste of time?"
Everyone else: "shhhhhh, what are you trying to do, put us out of a job? In this economy?"

Existential Comics

31 Mar 2025 19:30

If you love stinging and irony enough, it all adds up. Plus it's a pretty funny way to die, so you've got that going for you.

Existential Comics

24 Mar 2025 17:30

Am a cynical? Yeah maybe, the YouTube algorithm has been recommending me a log of myopic videos lately.

Existential Comics

17 Mar 2025 18:30

Nietzsche said “to live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering”, essentially believing that humans do not even wish to avoid suffering, but only find meaning in the suffering they endure. What's interesting about this, in the context of spicy peppers, is that humans actually enjoy eating them. Peppers evolved specifically to avoid being eaten by mammals, by activating our nerves with something called “capsaicin” that makes us literally feel like we are burning. Birds don’t respond the same way, so all the seeds get eaten by birds, which is better for the plant since birds fly farther away, and don’t chew the seeds.
As a result, all mammals (aside from the treeshrew, which seems to evolved an immunity) do not eat spicy peppers. All mammals, of course, except humans. Humans have a higher thought capacity that allows us to understand that we aren’t really burning, and there is no real danger. What’s interesting though is that this doesn’t just result in us bearing the suffering to reap the reward of the pepper’s nourishment. Humans actually enjoy the burn. In fact, in a strange twist of fate, the only animal on earth to enjoy peppers also made peppers one of the most successful plants on earth, because we also happened to be the only animal that cultivates plants on purpose. Chili peppers spread across the globe, and in fact were specially bred to be more spicy and burn us more. Humans seem to enjoy the very sensation of suffering.
Of course, everyone still seems to have a “limit” to how much spice they enjoy. Once you go past it, the physical reality of the pepper sensation overpowers the strange enjoyment we get from pretending our mouth is on fire, and it returns to the animal state of mere suffering. There is, however, an exception even to this. The premise of the YouTube show “Hot Ones” is of course based on this principle: it is actually pretty funny to subject ourselves to extreme pain on purpose. Ever since they bred spicy peppers that are too hot for anyone to reasonably enjoy, dudes have been daring each other to eat them for a laugh. So while humans have transcended the animal state, which responds to mere stimulus to make decisions (mouth hot! don’t eat!), and converted the pain to pleasure with knowledge, we can further transcend even our humanity and convert the higher level of suffering to pleasure, through will power.
This is why Conan O’Brian is the true existential hero of the show. Not only did Conan enjoy his suffering, because it was funnier the more he suffered, but his pleasure was directly tied to the suffering. He would have, in fact, been quite disappointed if he had not suffered, having been robbed of the goal of his directed will. He wished to suffer for glory, and to creatively construct a great episode and lasting memory for the show. This is Nietzsche’s rebuke of utilitarianism – mankind should seek to transcend lower goals of mere pleasure and pain so that they can instead create great art from their force of will. This is why we can say, I think quite confidently, that Conan O’Brian has at last achieved Nietzsche’s ultimate goal of transcending his humanity and becoming an Ubermensch.

Existential Comics

17 Mar 2025 18:30

Nietzsche Goes on Hot Ones - Existential Comics

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10 Mar 2025 17:30

The Beginning and End of Philosophy - Existential Comics

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03 Mar 2025 18:30

John Brown was a deep Christian too, so I don't know maybe there is something to it after all.

Existential Comics

24 Feb 2025 19:30

Despite popular imagination, people like Sartre never really talk about "the meaning of life". In fact he only mentions it once as far as I can tell, where "meaning" is used as "interpretation", making the point that we interpret our own lives in the same way we interpret novels - after the fact. So if we die halfway through a project, our interpretation might be totally different, so we shouldn't really be too worried about it, in a sense. What matters is our freedom and the decisions we actually make.
Oh and also he was a huge pervert.

Existential Comics

24 Feb 2025 19:30

Sartre and the Meaning of Life - Existential Comics

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17 Feb 2025 19:30

They were making a big mistake though, because they didn't realize that in a securlar society you can actually wear even sillier hats.

Existential Comics

10 Feb 2025 19:30

SMBC did an even more accurate version but I didn't want to copy them too much.

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10 Feb 2025 19:30

The Once and Future King - Existential Comics

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03 Feb 2025 19:30

They ended up going with the guy who told them it was their moral obligation to make as much money as possible so they could give a bit back to charity after, for uh...altruism or something.

Existential Comics

14 Apr 2025 19:30

For Henri Bergson, there was a big distinction between time as measured by scientists (which uses motion through space to measure it) and time as experienced by human beings, which he called duration. For him, this couldn't be measured scientifically, couldn't be broken down into discreet moments, and could only be experienced. Furthermore, he emphasizes that the past and future are only imaginary states that exist in the present as thoughts, so in reality the only thing that exists is our experience of time in the present.

Existential Comics

14 Apr 2025 19:30

Henri Bergson on Time - Existential Comics

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07 Apr 2025 18:30

Early Modern Brainstorm - Existential Comics

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31 Mar 2025 19:30

The Frog and the Scorpion From a Rational Point of View - Existential Comics

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24 Mar 2025 17:30

The History of Political Authority - Existential Comics

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17 Mar 2025 18:30

The reason the English don't like spicy food is because they never evolved to be fully human.

Existential Comics

10 Mar 2025 17:30

The problem with believing society always progresses is that you must also believe that reason always wins the power struggle against stupidity, which I don't know...I'm just not too sure about these days.

Existential Comics

03 Mar 2025 18:30

Simone Weil was an early 20th century philosopher, and communist. She dedicated most of her early life to politics doing things like building unions and even working in factories to understand the plight of the common worker, for the goal of communism. At this point she was a dedicated pacifist, having witnessed the horror of World War I. However, around the outbreak of World War II she converted to Catholicism, and far from curbing her political aims, she abandoned pacifism and picked up a gun to try to shoot Fascists in Spain, and later trying anything to help the war effort. I went on Rev Left Radio a while ago to talk about her full biography.

Existential Comics

03 Mar 2025 18:30

The Communist Who Found God - Existential Comics

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24 Feb 2025 19:30

"Is that your absolute free decision though, or are you just saying that because of societal expectations?"
"Oh it's authentic. Also I've authentically called the cops just fyi."

Existential Comics

17 Feb 2025 19:30

The Catholoic authorities in Holland censored Spinoza several times, sometimes even ahead of time before they had read his new work. Apparently once it was because they heard he had an "irrefutable proof that God didn't exist", which is pretty funny because if true, it would be pointless to censor, and instead you should reorganize society into some kind of Democracy, like Spinoza wanted. But people in charge tend to not want to do that, regardless of the truth. Amazing, I know.
I heard that fact (which is more like a rumor, we hardly know the exact reasons he was censored for the most part, but it was usually along those lines) on Rev Left Radio, which just put out a great episode on Spinoza.

Existential Comics

17 Feb 2025 19:30

The Censorship of Spinoza - Existential Comics

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10 Feb 2025 19:30

"Oh yeah and another thing, not a big fan of the English language, or the lack of Trial by Combat in deciding our differences!"

Existential Comics

03 Feb 2025 19:30

In The Conquest of Bread, Peter Kropotkin makes the argument that all technological progress more or less belongs to everyone.
We simply find ourselves existing in the modern world that inherits the efforts of billions of people to make it livable for us, spanning tens of thousands of years. The very land we live on has been cultivated by our ancestors to make it suitable to farming. Technology created in the past is handed to us to work this land. The crops we grow have been selectively bred for thousands of years to feed us. Animals like sheep and cows exist, which are nothing like their natural selves, having their DNA altered by the long slow efforts of our fore bearers. All this work belongs to all of us, but often the capitalist comes in at the last moment to buy the land, buy the animals, and patent the last 0.0001% of technological improvement to some contraption. From this ownership they are allowed to control everything.
For modern technology, the process has been somewhat shorter (although you can argue that scientific and philosophical thinkers for the last couple thousand years have been necessary to develop any technology, i.e. without Aristotle's labor there would be no Super Nintendo). However the same situation has occurred, literally billions of man-hours have been spent just on the software side to create operating systems which are free and open and given to capitalists (such as the Linux kernel and ecosystem). All of this work, as well as the scientific work to create the hardware, represents 99.9999% of the work to create something like OpenAI, and it belongs to all of us. From this, they spend a small amount of money to create a system, and in their case they also train their model off the additional billions of hours of man-hours in writing text, producing knowledge, and creating art, and then they seize control of the output of this work, and use it exclusively for private gain.
Anyway, I could go on, but the gist of it is that Kropotkin thinks this is bad. Some people would call this a bad system.

Existential Comics

03 Feb 2025 19:30

Resident Philosopher for AI Ethics - Existential Comics