neurons

A seven-panel SMBC comic. A bearded man and a woman talk against a moody dusk landscape. She asks if we'll ever understand the human brain; he says no, "scaling laws forbid it." He explains that a human brain of about 6 billion neurons can, with huge effort, perfectly comprehend the 302 neurons of the roundworm C. elegans, implying you need 10^8 times more neurons to fully understand another brain. So one day, he says, we'll build a computer with the equivalent of 6 quintillion neurons that will perfectly fathom our minds. Meanwhile, he notes, we live highly social lives with no rich sense of our friends or ourselves, relying on blunt concepts like "she's acting weird" or "he's grumpy today." The woman says "Wow." He concludes that physics permits beings who completely understand us, but only if they're so powerful they probably won't care about us. The woman replies, "This is how I became religious." In the votey, a lumpy hand-drawn character with a nervous expression asks: "Wanna come to my lab and cause an end of the world for a C. elegans population?"