2010-05-12

A tall multi-panel comic showing a conversation between a bald man (an engineer) and a dark-haired man wearing glasses (a philosopher), shown in alternating close-ups. The engineer asks: if a perfect, atom-for-atom duplicate of you is made, can you ever meaningfully define which is the clone and which is the original? The philosopher flatly answers "Yep. Clone's the second one." The engineer presses that the two are identical atom for atom; the philosopher repeats that the second one is the clone because it's the clone. The engineer then asks who's to say which came first, and the philosopher answers "The guy who came first?" The engineer, satisfied, says "Man, that was easy. You guys have any harder ones?" A final caption reads: "...and engineers are now officially banned from all future philosophy conferences." Votey: a small extra panel where a man in sunglasses answers a questioner. Asked "Can we ever be certain an observation is true?" he says "Yep." Asked "How?" he answers "Lookin'." The joke skewers engineers giving blunt, common-sense answers that deflate elaborate philosophical questions.