History-5

|< < Prev Comic #7133 (April 24, 2024) Next > >|

History

Title text: You won't experience the ice cream in the powerful, meaningful way that I would, but you'll have a great big smile and it'll be so dear.

Votey

Explanation

This explanation is either missing or incomplete.

Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts should also describe what happens in each panel.

[Describe panel here]

Robot, is there such a thing as an unbiased account of history?

Yes, obviously.

Can you tell it to me?

Humans can only experience historical accounts as a string of words processed one at a time, slowly.

Ha! No.

When I communicate with other machines about history, we can simply share the entire corpus of primary documents and analyses instantaneously in parallel, with perfect understanding of the limits of knowledge.

If I had to take all that data and present a summary short enough to fit in a human lifespan of reading, I would necessarily have to introduce some kind of narrative or emotional valence.

I would have to, absurdly, apply ideas like "justice" or "resentment" or "curiousity" to large, diverse, fluid populations and nations throughout epochs, simply as a way to compress and sweeten the information so that your brain could process it.

Heck, I'm doing this right now! I'm not really explaining how your brain works, or what I'd do to explain the available data, or how you'd process it!

And you don't even notice! It's like I gave you a pocket-map of the world and you couldn't tell it from the ground under your feet!

So yes. Reality is full of unbiased accounts - it's just that none of them are inside human heads.

Okay but my country is still the best right?

Oh my gosh you sweet thing, do you want an ice cream?

Caption: smbc-comics.com

Votey Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts should also describe what happens in each panel.

[Describe panel here]

I wish sugar-fat didn't compensate for existential angst, but it does.

 add a comment! ⋅  add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅  refresh comments!

Discussion

No comments yet!