Real

A seven-panel SMBC comic. A blue fairy with a wand tells a small boy, "And now, by my magic, you shall be... a real boy!" The boy asks, "What was I before?" The fairy answers, "You had the outward manner of a conscious being, but no internal conscious experience." The boy replies, "A philosophical zombie." He then objects at length: "That's incoherent. I was precisely reproducing the statements of a being with rich experience without anything going on inside? It doesn't even make computational sense. What resources generated the apparently conscious—hey, what are you doing?" The fairy, ignoring his philosophical argument, blasts him with magic from her wand. In the final panel the boy stares blankly, wide-eyed, now transformed. Votey aftercomic: a close-up of the boy's wide-eyed face with a thought bubble reading, "Sucks being a deterministic stimulus-response machine." The joke: the fairy turning him "real" actually made him a mindless deterministic machine, the opposite of conscious.