Existential Comics

10 November 2025 18:30

This is the ideal solution because it makes them both unhappy, revealing the horrible existential truth about the world: that Schopenhauer is an asshole.

Existential Comics

03 November 2025 19:30

"Yes he has devoured my body, but I have dealt him a far greater blow, I have planted the seed that will devour his soul, for as his anguish grows — AHHH OH SHIT NEVERMIND THIS IS WAY WORSE!!"

Existential Comics

27 October 2025 16:30

Modern generative AI is sort of John Searle's Chinese Room come to life, where he postulates being inside of a machine that can pass a Turing Test and see that it is only manipulating syntax, and has no consciousness, intentionality, or actual understanding of semantics. One big opponent of his theories are the Functional Theories of Mind. People like Hilary Putnam will say that if a machine can be build that does all the functions of a mind, then it is a mind. Anything like consciousness will come along with those functions, and if Searle's room is indistinguishable functionally from a human brain, then the room itself does in fact understand as we do.
Of course they have not exactly been proven wrong either with generative AI, because while they can pass simple Turing tests they fall apart very quickly under real scrutiny, precisely because they lack the things Searle suggested. Searle believed we needed to understand how the brain creates consciousness more before trying to replicate it with machines, because what the machines are doing now is clearly quite different. As of yet, we have not created any hardware that even attempts to do this, because we simply don't know what it is. Our conscious minds do clearly seem to do something other than "make a statistical guess at what other people might have said in this situation" though.

Existential Comics

27 October 2025 16:30

Philosophy vs the Terminator - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

20 October 2025 17:30

The Lord of the Rings is considered a fantasy because the trees win the battle against industrialization.

Existential Comics

13 October 2025 18:30

It's amazing how no philosophers have come up with the idea of "the best life is hoarding endless wealth while others toil in poverty", it's almost like it's a horrible idea.

Existential Comics

06 October 2025 18:30

Luckily when they come back they'll see that it was just a mistake, and the rest of human history is totally smart and good.

Existential Comics

29 September 2025 18:30

Ultimately of course it doesn't matter what Jesus actually teaches because people just make up what they want it to be after the fact.

Existential Comics

22 September 2025 18:30

The theory of Occams Razors (plural): the simplest solution to any given problem is often to razor the other guy.

Existential Comics

15 September 2025 19:30

Those are the engineering vampires you dolt! After 10,000 years of philosophy, you still don't know the difference?

Existential Comics

08 September 2025 19:30

Thales, in the corner: "yes we are going under water, but everything is water, when you think about it, so..."

Existential Comics

01 September 2025 19:30

Many philosophers throughout the ages have pointed out that fashion is superficial and constantly changing. Probably the most banal and obnoxious thing a philosopher can possibly point out. Thoreau, who might be the most obnoxious of all time, wisely said things like:

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes ... When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "They" at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates ... We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

Five years in the woods well spent, my dude, you've discovered that styles change. Sorry if people told you your weird neckbeard is "out of style" but that's just a polite way to say that no one in any era ever would have thought it looked good.
Thomas More is a bit more interesting, but equally annoying and sanctimonious. He imagines a perfect society in one in which everyone is so wise that they dress as badly as possible at all times. They don't even bother with nice clothes (because they are so busy reading philosophy all the time) and their only use for gold is to us it as chains.
Diogenes is the most interesting for sure, and the most extreme. Where the others give the very easy idea of "boo fashion, it is superficial, not like us!", Diogenes eschews all culture entirely. He strips down main to his "natural" self. No clothes. No civilization. He claims that to live best is to live as the animals do, with our natural instincts.
Hegel didn't talk about fashion much, of course, but when he did he treated it relatively the same as he did everything else. He remarked how fashion, like many other areas of society, undergoes predictable world historical arcs. For example, primitive tribes don't wear any clothes. Then as civilization progresses they put on and more clothes, until a certain point is reached and they start taking off more clothes again. The arc of history creates women's modesty, then slowly removes it. It creates highly formal outfits, then slowly becomes more casual.
I think it's reasonable to think that for Hegel, fashion knowledge producing like anything else, and in the end of history, when the full arc of philosophy comes to its conclusion and all knowledge has been gained, the philosophers of the future will not eschew fashion, but have full mastery and knowledge of it. In other words they will dress cool as hell.

Existential Comics

01 September 2025 19:30

The Philosophy of Fashion - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

25 August 2025 18:30

Just once I'd like an imperialist leader to be like "oh yeah I'm doing it because I'm evil. We are the bad guys." But nah they always have to come up with some reason why it's actually good to firebomb babies or whatever.

Existential Comics

18 August 2025 18:30

William James, with his pragmatic theory of truth, criticized the dominant scientific view of his time, which held that we should only believe things if we have adequate empirical evidence for them. He argued that many important ways we use belief in society follow a different pattern — in fact, belief can often come first and create the fact afterward.
He gave various examples. One was of a man who believes a woman should love him, and pursues her until she does. Another is from sports, where top athletes maintain a seemingly irrational belief that they can defeat any opponent. For instance, Buster Douglas never could have beaten Mike Tyson if he hadn’t first believed he could. In such cases, the belief created the fact.
His most famous example is that of train robbers, who are able to rob hundreds of passengers despite being only a few men. James explained that the robbers succeed because they can count on one another, whereas the passengers lack belief that, if they resist, others will rise up with them. If the passengers all believed in each other enough to rise together, that shared trust would give them the courage to act — and simultaneously destroy the robbers’ belief that they could succeed.
None of these examples fit the standard account of belief described by philosophers, yet huge portions of society depend on precisely this kind of belief and social trust.

Existential Comics

10 November 2025 18:30

Schopenhauer vs A Child with Candy - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

03 November 2025 19:30

The Alien Hive vs Existentialism - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

27 October 2025 16:30

Of course those captchas are used to teach the computers how to recognize things like bridges, so ultimate we are training the Terminator to bypass our locks and expediting our own demise.

Existential Comics

20 October 2025 17:30

Thomas Malthus was an English philosopher and economist who thought that because food growth grew at a slower rate than population growth, catastrophic events such as famines and plagues were always needed to "re-balance" the population. While he didn't advocate for going back to nature like Treebeard (and to a lesser extent Tolkien, although it was more nostalgia than a real policy, as he understood you can't go back), it's clear that trying to reverse technological progress, particularly in farming, would kill of millions of people in a kind of Malthusian catastrophe.
Malthus was wrong, by the way, precisely because the industrialization of farming has the exact opposite effect that he was describing (food production goes up at a much faster rate than population). Saruman's industrialization is the cure to the perpetual famines that humanity used to suffer.

Existential Comics

20 October 2025 17:30

The Ents vs Industrialization - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

13 October 2025 18:30

The Robbery of Epicurus - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

06 October 2025 18:30

Aliens in Athens - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

29 September 2025 18:30

The Three Wise Men - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

22 September 2025 18:30

Occam's Razors - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

15 September 2025 19:30

Philosophy Vampires - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

08 September 2025 19:30

Philosophy in a Life Boat - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

01 September 2025 19:30

Who is wiser after all, the man who refuses to learn about looking good, claiming his ignorance is wisdom? Or the man who, through application of his intelligence and knowledge, has gained the power to dress cool as hell? I think we all know the answer.

Existential Comics

25 August 2025 18:30

Caesar, like most brutal conquerors and imperialists, had the additional awkward job of coming up with some kind of reason why he wasn't just an evil monster for killing so many people. He came up with lots of stories about how primitive and savage people like the Gauls and Britons were. Vivid tales of human sacrifice taking place in dark bloody sacred groves were spread around that may or may not
be true. He also claimed they were nomadic (which wasn't really true, plus who cares?) and that they shared their women across many men ("they are doing sex wrong so they have to die" is always a classic).
Probably the funniest one though is that they didn't have cheese. "Cheeseless societies must be exterminated" really shows how the Romans were proto-Italians. Basically the Romans didn't drink milk (they didn't have many cows and were probably lactose intolerant), and thought anyone who did was a savage. "They are eating food wrong so they have to die" is strangely also not uncommon.

Existential Comics

25 August 2025 18:30

The Philosophy of Julius Caesar - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

18 August 2025 18:30

"Maybe I can believe hard enough that bullets don't kill me? Nope. Didn't work." *dies*.