Pill Bugs are People, Too

Hard to swallow

At first glance you may think John is out of his proverbial mind, or out of his lane, because I am thinking and writing about bugs. Pill Bugs. Let's start with my own self correction. I discovered a pill bug isn't an insect. (Duh, six legs criterion, obviously.) It's a terrestrial isopod crustacean — closer taxonomically to shrimp and crabs. What got me thinking about them is even weirder. There was a terrestrial isopod crustacean interloper in my bathroom. So, fair enough, not all bugs are insects. Hello, guy. You got to go!

Guy or gal? I don't have the pill bug anatomy knowledge or the inclination to delve further. Does it have a family? I think about that. Is any pill-bug 'family' or do they have people they don't like, too?

This interloper has me seriously thinking. In the past, my view of bugs-not bugs was that they were just little biological robots. Not much going on. That view is increasingly askew from actual research.

They don't appear to be little stimulus-response robots. Experiments have found behavioral flexibility in Armadillidium vulgare, including generating alternative behavior when their normal movement strategy doesn't work, and researchers have measured consistent individual behavioral differences — something analogous to "personality."

A 2025 review of insect consciousness discusses evidence concerning attention, prediction, emotion-like states, sleep, self/other distinctions and other phenomena. Its conclusion isn't "insects are conscious," but that accumulating evidence increases the probability that at least some insects have subjective experience.

A major review of insect pain likewise found considerably more neural and behavioral evidence than the traditional "they're basically reflex machines" picture would suggest.

And, tangential indulgence, a study that I find hard to shake: as the number of dead flies on a windowsill goes up, anxiety in the flies trying to escape through the said window goes up.

What the bleep is going on?

So, Armadillidium vulgare has been around awhile. Like a hundred million years. Its broader terrestrial crustacean family dates back over 100 million years.

I hope you can hold tangents: Carcinization — the process where unrelated crustacean lineages independently evolve a crab-like body plan — has occurred in at least five distinct groups. True Crabs (Brachyura), King Crabs, Porcelain Crabs, Sponge Crabs, Australian Hairy Stone Crab (Lomis hirta…) Link that to HG Wells book, the Time Machine, where he goes to the future and finds giant, roaming crabs.

Are we all on our way to being crabs? I have been known to be 'crabby.'

Armadillidium vulgare basically means "the common Armadillidium" — the common pill bug. Latin vulgaris means "common," "ordinary," "usual," or "of the people." It comes from vulgus, meaning the common people or multitude. Vulgus (the people,) vulgaris (common/ordinary,) vulgar (commonplace,) coarse/unrefined (obscene or indecent…)

It's also why we call everyday spoken Latin Vulgar Latin. It doesn't mean Romans were walking around speaking Dirty Latin. On the other hand, Benjamin Franklin was known as Dirty old Ben for a reason. Though there are no notes revealing a historical record of him conducting research on isopods or "roly-polies," it is reasonable to conclude he made a few vulgars roll up into their protective stance.

And this, too, not verified, and by "not verified" I mean I just made it up, but would be ironic (funny) if discovered to be true after the fact… the original draft of the Declaration of Independence was proposed by Ben: The Declaration of the Vulgar. Washington pleaded for him to stop. "We the vulgar…" Stop it! So Ben drafted free speech on the fly… or Pill Bug…

Full circle, stop.

Clearly, from a biological, evolutionary perspective Armadillidium vulgare is a very stable platform.

I want to exploit this concept from the platform perspective. Assume all biological organisms are containers for souls, or platforms similar to remote controlled avatars to navigate an alien terrain.

Earth is a terraforming project, with an abundance of exploitable, self replicating, sophisticated, biological-AI bots.

Let's say that again. Normally exploit sounds predatory, but biologically, mutual exploitation can become cooperation: I have something you need; you have something I need; let's use each other. Nature is capitalism! Abundance is built into the system. Whether we are talking pollinators and plants, or gut biomes and humans, synergistic systems are a fact of life. We may all be one! Maybe if we think that way instead of fighting everyone and everything, life would be obscenely different.

But back to the driving question: What benefit does a soul gain from driving a bug-bot?

I would be guarded against the conclusion that souls advance through sophisticated biological vehicles based on soul evolution. Thinking of bugs as less sophisticated because they came first in the evolutionary tree doesn't seem appropriate.

And also, driving a bug body is completely different than driving a human body. Different limbs, different senses, different heads-up display.

Let's clarify the premise I am working from: consciousness/soul is not produced by the organism; an organism is a biological interface through which consciousness experiences a world.

Then I don't think the progression necessarily has to be: pill bug → mouse → dog → ape → human as though consciousness were leveling up from Atari to PlayStation.

A human interface gives you extraordinary symbolic abstraction, autobiographical memory, language, anticipation of distant futures, moral reasoning, and an enormously complicated social world.

A pill-bug interface strips nearly all of that away. I can't even imagine what it's like to be a pill bug; but clearly God can. That's the running joke in Terry Pratchett. God loves beetles.

A bat, tangential example, isn't necessarily playing the human game with worse graphics. Its perceptual world is organized around information humans don't naturally possess. Surprisingly, you can teach a person to see with sound. Human echolocation is a real thing. A dog gets an enormous chemical-information channel that is almost absent from our conscious HUD. And yet, there was a lady, Joy Milne, who can smell Parkinson, so well she detected it in a person who was so early the scientists couldn't detect it. This is a great video: Science Can't Explain this Woman's Superpower.

Birds may incorporate magnetic information. Bees perceive ultraviolet patterns that are invisible to us.

Could it be humans have access to all of this, we just don't utilize it, the same way we under utilize our sense of smell? Like we under utilize sound?

Is this a software problem, not a hardware problem? Personalities change how information is utilized, despite the information available to the platform!

The pill-bug experiential world might be dominated by things such as moisture, darkness, contact, chemical information, temperature, shelter, movement, danger, feeding, and reproduction. The significance of the world would therefore be radically different.

But even they might have personality preferences, which might explain one stray pill bug, versus a million pill-bugs all rushing my bathroom like a stream of lemmings jumping off cliffs.

Did you know the lemmings doing mass suicide is a myth, so I am just using it as a metaphor… which likely perpetuates the myth.

Are you tired of the John tangents?

And all of that mental gymnastics and detours, more convoluted than Family Circus kids going from his bedroom to get a glass of water from the kitchen, to ask: "What would a soul learn from being a pill bug?"

Does the interloper feel lost, roaming the tiled floor of a bathroom? Can he/she navigate back to where he came from? Did thirst drive him to this desert floor?

Does it feel fear navigating the repetitive geometry of the tiled floor? Does it sing as it walks? "Inch worm, inch worm, measuring the marigolds…"

The light comes on suddenly. Does it notice? By any other name, will marigold smell as sweet? Do marigold's smell differently in sunlight than at night?

Science is saying plants have more going on than we thought, too. Do roses, or marigolds, like being picked/pruned? Why all these bright blooms only for them to fade and die and be replaced? If we stopped picking them, or bees stopped molesting them, would flowers go away?

I did not practice catch and release this morning. I picked it up with a tissue and flushed it. Did it experience pain?

Do the souls driving these creatures share an update, stay out of people's bathrooms?

When I kill bugs, like the fire ants in the backyard, I do pray. "Sorry, but you got to go. Please tell your little friends to remain outside my declared boundary. Thank you. That is all."

I don't want to kill bugs. I just want them to respect my boundaries.

I wonder. Can scientists build a universal communication device and we just broadcast deterrents to critters.

Stay in your lane, little fellow. There's water and food over there.

We can coexist, just not in the same space at the same time.

Like seriously, if ants could come in once a week, clean the floor and go home, I would pay for that maid service.