world-modeling

A single-panel SMBC comic styled as a probability table. The caption above reads: "If you could see your brain's world-modeling system, it would be incredibly embarrassing." The table has two columns, THEORY and PROBABILITY, listing the brain's secret confidence in various beliefs: "There are ghosts in the dark" 1.5%; "The people in the mirror are actual people and not reflections" 0.25%; "The people who don't look like me are at fault" 8%; "I am friends with the people on TV" 28%; "Any given conspiracy theory is true" 1%; "Every story has a villain and a hero" 98%; "The barista is flirting with me" 6%; and "I am not the center of this issue" 0.000001%. The joke is that the brain assigns absurd, self-flattering, and irrational confidence levels to things, with near-certainty about narrative heroes/villains and near-zero odds of not being the protagonist. The votey (a small follow-up panel) is a hand-drawn box reading: "The black and white pixels I'm staring at right now form a cohesive thought." -- a meta-joke that the very act of reading the comic is itself the brain's questionable world-modeling.