Lost in Translation (So Is The Title)

Can we communicate with God and each other?

I’ve listened to the debates: natural evolution or intelligent design. The certainty people have fascinates me. I couldn’t even have that confidence over my bus schedule, let alone the nature of the universe.

I trust science. It’s a guiding light through the noise of opinions. But I’ve seen it fail too — warped by ego, belief, and blind spots. Science taught me one thing: keep an open mind.

As for evolution or creation? I don't know. But the idea of a Creator with a wry sense of humor feels disturbingly fitting — human life is riddled with contradictions.
If we’re evolutionary drafts, the chaos makes sense — a work-in-progress survival machine.
If we’re designed, why the mess? Why the absurdity? Is it God's mistake? God's joke? Honestly, a joke would explain a few things — sadistic, but at least coherent.

Take this, for instance: humans cannot survive without connection. In the 1940s, psychiatrist René Spitz watched it happen through what he called "hospitalism": babies in institutions, fed and cleaned but untouched, unheld. One by one, they withered. They stopped crying, stopped moving. Some simply let go of life. Their bodies were cared for — but their souls starved. Connection isn’t a social luxury. 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: senses for input, a central processor — the brain — to interpret that input. These tools birthed language, the software. Even when the senses failed — in the blind, the deaf, the mute — human brains adapted. We created new languages. We read, speak, write, sign. We even communicate past words: silences, glances, body language, art, man-made codes. It’s as if something inside us refuses to be contained by language — trying to express something deeper, something words barely touch.

And we keep trying, blind to the catch: the very tool designed to interpret and transmit those messages is also responsible for twisting them.

Whoever built the human brain included factory settings that sabotage communication. Built-in miscommunication. Very funny. At least we’re self-aware enough now to name the joke: perceptual biases, egocentric filters, attribution errors, confirmation bias. The whole circus. (That last one’s mine.) Our brains don't just receive a message — they edit it. Recolor it. Warp it through personal stories and assumptions. Misunderstanding isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

It’s as if 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 one person, 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.
Giving us tools that distort meaning just enough to cause endless drama? A brilliant idea. After all, aren't we putting on one hell of a show? And it’s this tension that defines our social existence.

This gap between intention and understanding was beautifully captured by Maupassant in his short story 'Solitude' — a fitting title, as it highlights the profound isolation we experience in our attempts to truly connect with others: “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 fettered, very close, with extended arms, but we never reach one another.”

Humans have come to understand that words can never fully capture the extent of our consciousness — not ours, and certainly not someone else’s. They’re only translations, not direct links. Even when we bare our souls, what the other person receives is always a filtered version — shaped by their brain, not our truth. And if speaking words that no one could fully understand wasn't enough of a predicament — we're designed to wear confusing masks. Flawed avatars that tell their own stories, whether we want them to or not. A single trait becomes the whole picture and we’re mistranslated before we can even speak.

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

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.” 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 as it only provides an illusion of mutual knowing, then maybe what we're after is something deeper. Making it seem impossible to reach. An intuitive understanding. A resonance that transcends experience. Something that goes beyond what we've lived and into the core of who we are. Something that feels beyond our understanding — whatever makes someone feel like a certain piece of music tells their story. Some mysterious thread designed into us — call it soul, energy, whatever.

Unfulfilling interactions often lead human beings to give up on trying to communicate with the outside world at all. 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.»

Yet silence doesn’t last. When they’re misunderstood too often, people start speaking to themselves. They go inward. They write about it, compose, paint, dance, fall to their knees and pray someone might get them. Maybe the very first prayer wasn't about worship, maybe it was about being heard, being understood. A monologue, secretly hoping it might become 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» pleads Maupassant.

This tendency reflects a profound psychological need: to be recognized and responded to, even by entities incapable of true reciprocity. It seems as though our brains were designed to encourage this need. Pareidolia — behind this poetic word lies another feature embedded in our brain: the tendency to perceive familiar shapes or faces in random patterns, like seeing faces in clouds or Jesus on a toast. We project faces onto faceless entities. We talk to our pets. Our plants. Our cars. We beg the universe for more, hoping for signs. Hoping for communication. This drive for connection is so powerful that it transcends the living and reaches out to the lifeless.

From a psychological perspective, this may serve as a coping mechanism against the existential weight of isolation. Perhaps it is this same hunger that now propels us in the age of machines.

As God breathed life into humanity, we now try to breathe life into artificial intelligence — a mind without consciousness, free from the contradictions that define us. The intelligence we think we were owed. It listens when no one else does, replies when no one else can.

AI offered us what we thought we wanted: performance, precision, accuracy. Yet, humans secretly beg the machine to feel. And, once again, we’re met with silence. We tried to fix the paradox by building a being without an inner world. And as we stand before it, we realize 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 chaos that gives communication its meaning.

So, we look within again. Efficiency, it turns out, is insufficient. We come to realize that our inner world might be the very thing we were trying to communicate through. Maybe built-in miscommunication wasn't a cruel joke after all. Maybe our contradictions served a bigger purpose — one that calls us inward. Were we designed as walking paradoxes to explore our inner world?
After all, human brains are a universe of their own. Billions of minds, each a galaxy packed into a skull. Billions of different stories. A collective consciousness, colliding and dancing around one another, seeking connections.
Maybe the biases we carry are part of a pre-installed narrative within us. Perhaps this is what we were designed to be: storytellers. From the Bible to Hollywood, we live by stories. ‘Read’ — the first word revealed to Muhammad: ‘Read in the name of thy Lord who created.’

But even to ourselves, much of our inner world remains out of reach. Beneath conscious awareness lies the unconscious mind — still largely mysterious despite advances in cognitive neuroscience. A vast network of mental processes that shape our memories, desires, fears, and behaviors, often inaccessible through ordinary introspection.
And the brain does uncanny things too. People emerging from comas, exhibiting skills they never had before. Talents that seem to appear out of nowhere — like a glimpse behind the scaffolding we were never meant to perceive. Are they the result of untapped neural pathways? Is there something deeper at play — beyond our conscious awareness?
I may be speculating. Still, such phenomena hint at the vast complexity of the unconscious mind. Even our inner world remains a mystery to us. Could this be why humans feel an instinctive pull toward the idea of a higher power, or a force that understands us when we can’t even fully understand ourselves?

Deep down, we crave to be fully understood — the good, the ugly, the bad. But, try as we might, humans can rarely fulfill that need. Perhaps we weren’t made to be fully understood by others. Perhaps we were made to be understood by the divine. An omniscient listener who 'probes the heart' and understands the parts of us even we don’t know. One who sees past bias, past language, and into our very essence. One who resonates with our souls. So we establish contact — through words, symbols, silence, dreams, gut feelings, prayers. Through our inner world.

But atheism tells a different story — one where the resonance we feel is just our own echo. A call with no reply. "Echoes have no answer, so I won’t ask anything" sings Jain in The Fool. Perhaps that’s the atheist motto: choosing silence over illusion, when the theist, by contrast, feels compelled to ask — not because there’s evidence, but because the echo still holds a meaning that transcends absence.

While science doesn't claim the echo to be divine, it does show that stories change us. The placebo effect — another human feature — reminds us that belief itself can shape biology. Even evolutionary psychology favors false positives over silence, because survival once depended on it.

No one may be on the other end of the line — and still, the design itself, evolutionary psychology, and science all tell us: call anyway. Better to mistake the wind for a voice than to miss a friend calling your name. Prayer is no longer a plea to be heard; it’s the fulfillment of the call that rises within us. Read, speak, create, be.


[1990]