Bugs. Creepy-crawlers. Taxonomically unspecific things that often contain chitin, slime, or possibly both. Imagine them.
Imagine them in front of you, slowly slinking towards you.
Imagine them on you, their small feet pitter-pattering across your skin. If they in fact have feet, you’re not really sure, they may just be tiny mouths that they use to support their weight and get around.
Now you’re imagining them, but what if they were you? Eminent philosophers of the 1970s first suggested that maybe “we’re just dust in the wind.” But what if we’re just bugs, in the wind. Bugs in human suits, which are then in the wind.
Is there any way you can prove that you are not, in fact, controlled by a well-organized conspiracy of bugs living under your skin? When was the last time you checked yourself for bugs? Has a doctor ever actually told that you weren’t “just a bag of meat controlled by a very sophisticated colony of bugs?” They crawl up and down the skeletal system that you think is yours but is really just a house for their little bug conventions and bug congresses. They come to decisions in their bug capitol and then carry it out using their little bug hands to move your slightly larger, not-exactly-bug-hands.
Really, how are we any different from squishy, small, irrelevant bugs? We’re alive. We have some amount of legs and arms that may or may not be larger than zero. We have a limited understanding of the universe as a whole and our insignificant role in it. We may be just milliseconds from meeting our irreversible doom at the whim of some large cosmic force wearing Teva sandals. Our eyes may or may not be segmented into thousands of smaller eyes glancing in every direction and rendering every single layer of buggishness in a disgustingly sharp image, which are then recursively split into yet more eyes inside eyes inside make it stop oh god the eyes.
But seriously, we could be bugs.
