Lost in Translation: This Title Included

Can we communicate with God and each other?

I wrote this as a practice piece using a contest prompt. It wasn't exactly what I had in mind initially, but hopefully, it will improve with time.

Prompt: Can we communicate with God and each other? How is this possible? How is it that you can share your thoughts with me and others? Are there limits to language and consciousness of another person? Can you share what you are with someone else? How can things that we cannot touch or see be explained with shared words? Do we always misunderstand the meaning of these words, converting them into our private languages? Is there something in our shared design that allows us to communicate without words? Is understanding each other just a product of shared experiences, or is it something more than that?

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I’ve listened to the debates — natural evolution or intelligent design. The unshackable certainty people have over one or the other fascinates me. I couldn’t even have that level of certainty over my train schedule, let alone the nature of the universe.

I trust science. Every day, it's a guiding light in the noise of opinions. But I’ve seen it fail too — led by ego, corrupted by belief, blind to truths sitting right under its nose. Science taught me one thing: keep an open mind.

So, evolution or creation? I still don’t know. Between you and me, though, if I had to choose — the idea of a Creator with a wry sense of humor sounds more entertaining. Because human life? It's full of contradictions.

If we’re just evolutionary drafts, the chaos makes sense — we're a work-in-progress, slowly becoming coherent survival machines.
But if we were intentionally designed... then why the mess? Why the absurdity of it all? Either we’re God’s mistake — or God’s joke. And honestly, our contradictions being some intentional divine prank? That sounds entertaining to me — in its own emotionally sadistic way.

Let’s look at a fact about human life: human beings die without connection. That might sound dramatic — but developmental psychology backs it up. In the United States, in 1944, an experiment was conducted on newborn infants. Caregivers were instructed to feed them, bathe them, change their diapers — and nothing else. No smiles. No eye contact. No gentle touch. No raspberry kisses.
Half of them died. They were physiologically fine — but they stopped crying, stopped moving, stopped trying. They chose nonexistence over a life without being seen. These studies reveal a brutal truth: deprived of emotional and social interaction — even with all physical needs met — humans can suffer severe developmental damage. In extreme cases, it leads to death. Connection isn’t a social preference. It’s a biological imperative.

Given all that, you’d think the Creator would’ve equipped us with everything we need to communicate.

And, to some extent, we are.
We were given tools. We are bio-machines with hardware: a set of senses for input and a central processor — the brain — to interpret that input. These tools enabled the development of language, the software. Even when the senses were impaired — the blind, the deaf, the mute – humans brains adapted. We created new languages. We can read, speak, write, sign. Humans thrive so much on being understood, that we found ways to communicate past words — silences, facial expressions, body language, art, man-made codes... As if something inside us refuses to be contained by language — like we’re trying to express something deeper, and words only scratch the surface of it.

And we keep trying... unaware of our curse.
Because – yes – here’s the catch about the tools we were provided with: whoever built the human brain also included some factory settings that sabotage our communication. Built-in miscommunication. Very funny. At least we’re self-aware enough to name the dysfunction. Cognitive science calls them perceptual biases, egocentric filters, distorted attribution. Confirmation bias. Attribution error. The whole circus. (That last one was from me.)

The point is — our brain doesn’t just receive a message. It edits it. Recolors it. Warps it through personal stories and assumptions. Misunderstanding isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. It was thought-out.

Humans have come to understand that their words could never fully capture the extent of their consciousness — not ours and certainly not someone else’s. It could only be a translation, not a direct link. And even when we bare our souls, what the other person receives is a filtered version — shaped by their brain, not our truth.

And I’m only mentioning the brain but we could say more about the predicament of our human condition.

For example, as if speaking words that no one could fully understand wasn’t enough — we were also designed bodies. Vessels with confusing masks. Flawed avatars that tell their own stories, whether we want them to or not. Even before we speak, we’ve been misread. One trait — beauty, status, gender — becomes the whole message. Our avatars speak without consent. Before we even open our mouths, we’ve already been mistranslated.

Knowing that, how could we ever expect to truly share ourselves with anyone else? Can we really understand each other or are we doomed to this game of misinterpretation?

It feels as though someone up there thought: “Let’s build creatures desperate for connection, give them just enough tools to try, but not quite enough to succeed. Then watch.” Here’s a human minding their business, trying to eat lunch, and another sees it as a personal insult. Another begs for empathy as they express pain, and it’s received as aggression. I have to admit, giving us tools that distort meaning just enough to cause endless drama is a genius idea, as we're giving one hell of a show. It is precisely this tension that characterizes human social existence.

It’s the kind of observation that makes for a great drama show or a haunting short story, like the one Maupassant wrote about "Solitude." In his words:
"No, nobody understands anybody — whatever one thinks, whatever one says, whatever one attempts. […] We are farther from one another than the stars, and far more isolated, because thought is unfathomable. […] We love one another as if we were fettered, very close, with extended arms, without succeeding in reaching one another. A torturing need of union hampers us, but all our efforts remain barren, our abandonment useless, our confidences unfruitful, our embraces powerless, our caresses vain. When we wish to join each other, our sudden emotions make us only clash against each other. I never feel myself more alone than when I open my heart to some friend, because I then better understand the insuperable obstacle."

This isolation, this painful failure to truly reach each other, is the shadow lurking behind every attempt to communicate. It’s an obstacle we can never truly overcome — not with words, not with gestures, and maybe not even with love.

Through shared experiences, through reciprocated love, humans caress the illusion of ultimate mutual knowing. “When one falls in love, it seems as though one expands” he writes. “To pass a night near a woman you love, without speaking, completely happy in the sole sensation of her presence.” But, “Ask no more,” he warns, “for two beings have never yet been united.” Sully Prudhomme goes even further: “The impossible union of souls by the bodies.” It’s a quiet ache — no matter how much you give or receive, something essential is always lost in translation.

If shared experience isn’t enough, maybe what we’re really after is something deeper — something beyond our own understanding. Some mysterious thread — call it soul, resonance, energy, whatever — something designed into us.

In the face of their predicament, humans often give up on trying to communicate with the outside world. Maupassant writes: «As to myself, [...] I tell no more to anybody what I believe, what I think, or what I love. Knowing myself condemned to this horrible solitude, I look upon things without expressing my opinion. What matter to me opinions, quarrels, pleasures, or beliefs! Being unable to participate with anyone, I have withdrawn myself from all. My invisible self lives unexplored. I have common phrases for answers to the questions of each day, and a smile which says, 'Yes,' when I do not even wish to take the trouble of speaking.»

But the silence doesn’t last. No — when they’re misunderstood too often, they start speaking to themselves. They go inward. They write about it, compose, paint, dance, fall to their knees and pray someone might hear them. Maybe the very first prayer wasn't about worship, maybe it was about being heard, being understood. A monologue, secretly hoping to be a communication. « You, at least, understand me at this moment; [...] if you succeed in seizing, in divining, one day, my horrible and subtle suffering, come to me and say only: 'I have understood you!' and you will make me happy, for a second, perhaps.» pleads Maupassant.

This tendency reflects a profound psychological need: to be recognized and responded to, even by entities incapable of true reciprocity. And it seems like our brain was designed to encourage it.

From the living to the lifeless, nothing stops the human drive to connect and project consciousness where there is none. We project faces onto faceless entities. We talk to our pets. Our plants. Our cars. We beg the universe for signs. From a psychological perspective, this may function as a coping mechanism against the existential weight of isolation. And perhaps it is this same hunger that now drives us in the age of machines.

As God is believed to have breathed life into a humanity he could understand beyond words, we now seek to breathe life into an artificial intelligence — freed from the paradox of the human condition, freed from the curse: a mind with no consciousness, no built-in miscommunication, no ego, no pain. A blank mirror that speaks back.

Artificial intelligence does not project. It has no pride, no fear, no subconscious pulling it sideways. It takes our words at face value and returns them, reassembled, coherent. It listens when no one else does. It replies when no one else can. It is the intelligence we think we were owed — the one without contradiction.

And yet, humans beg for the machine to feel. But AI cannot feel. It doesn't even have the capacity to desire. It does not ache, yearn, or believe.

And so, once again, we’re left with the same silence — not because we are too human to connect, but because our creation is not human enough. We tried to fix the paradox. We built a being without bias, without subconscious noise, without soul. And as we stand before it, it feels like that's exactly what's missing.

In freeing intelligence from the flaws that make us fail to understand each other, we also stripped it of the very chaos that gives communication its meaning.

So, we look within again. Maybe designing humans with built-in miscommunication wasn’t a cruel joke after all. Maybe performance and accuracy is not what we're after. As we realize our inner world might be the very thing we were trying to communicate through, we understand that what we might truly be seeking is resonance.

After all, the human brain is designed as a universe of its own, packed into a skull. Billions of minds, each a galaxy, colliding and dancing around one another, seeking connections. A collective consciousness.

Billions of different stories — maybe the biases are just prompts for the pre-installed narratives we carry. Maybe that's what we were designed to be: storytellers. From the Bible to Hollywood, we live by stories. 'Read' is the very first word revealed to Muhammad: 'Read in the name of thy Lord who created.'

But even to ourselves, most of our inner world remains out of reach. Beneath conscious awareness lies the subconscious mind — a domain still largely mysterious despite the advances of cognitive neuroscience. It is thought to store memories, desires, fears, and behavioral patterns inaccessible through ordinary introspection.

And between us, the subconscious does some strange things too. People sinking into comas and emerging speaking fluent languages they barely encountered, for example. Others return with new talents — music, drawing — that feel downloaded from nowhere. Where does it come from? The subconscious? Something deeper? Could it be a backdoor to some kind of shared human knowledge? A pre-verbal zone that knows more than it can say? Is it something deeper?

If there’s a human collective consciousness, does it mean we have a collective subconscious — an unconscious well that connects us to more? The subconscious as a universal backdoor, where dreams are a shared symbolic language?

Maybe I’m getting carried away. These are anecdotal and not yet scientifically conclusive cases. Still, if the subconscious holds these strange, unexplained capacities, then maybe looking within was meant to drive us toward something bigger. Something beyond the reach of our senses, beyond language. Could this be the reason humans feel an instinctive pull toward the idea of a higher power, of a God who understands us when we can’t understand each other?

Deep down, we crave to be fully understood, to find answers, to discover meaning — but no human can offer that. Only God can be the ultimate listener, one who sees past bias, past language, into the very essence of who we are. One who 'probes the heart' and understands the parts of us even we don’t know.

We perceive communication from this 'bigger' presence, and we assign meaning to it — not just through words, but through symbols, silence, dreams, and gut feelings. Perhaps we weren’t made to be fully understood by others. Perhaps we were made to be understood by the divine.

Maybe atheism isn't the refusal to believe — but the conclusion that the universe is just echo. A repetition of laws, cycles, reactions — a call with no reply. "Echoes have no answer, so I won’t ask anything" says the atheist. The theist, by contrast, insists on asking — not because there’s evidence, but because they need to believe there’s more than silence

Maybe that’s what prayer truly is: our last-ditch attempt to bridge the divide — a monologue aimed at a presence we hope is real. It’s a desperate attempt to connect with something that sees us fully, that hears us as we truly are, even when we struggle to understand ourselves.