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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Are human beings the product of natural evolution or the intentional design of a higher intelligence ? Don't ask me, I wouldn't know.
Between you and me though, the latter sounds entertaining.

You see, human life is full of contradictions.
If human beings are the mere product of natural evolution then it means that these contradictions are simple flaws in evolutionary design.
But if human beings have been thought through then this contradiction means something more.

Either the contradiction was also a flaw in design and our Creator was still learning the craft.
Or the contradiction was intentional and our Creator had a wry sense of humor.
And I find the latter, quite entertaining – in an emotionally sadistic way.

Let's look at this fact about human life: human beings die without connection.
You might think that my choice of word is dramatic but developmental psychology will tell you that it's actually not far from the truth. For example, in the United States, in 1944, an experiment was conducted that involved newborn infants. Caregivers were instructed to feed them, bathe them, change their diapers and nothing else. No smile, no eye contact, no raspberry kiss. Half of them died. They were physiologically well but they stopped crying, stopped moving, stopped trying and left. They chose nonexistence over a life without being seen.
These studies highlight a profound truth : human beings deprived of emotional and social interaction, despite receiving adequate physical nourishment, can suffer severe developmental delays and in extreme cases, it could lead to death. Connection is not a social preference but a biological imperative.

Given that, you'd think the Creator would equip humans with the necessary tools to communicate. Well, to some extent, we are.
Human beings are bio-machines with a bunch of sensors — our senses — and a central processor — the brain — to interpret that input. These tools enabled the development of language. Words, spoken, written but also wordless languages. Humans thrive so much on communication, that they found ways to connect even when words failed — silence, body language, art, man-made codes... Necessity truly is the mother of invention.

Maybe this need to communicate without words comes from somewhere deeper in us — something built into us that words couldn't fully capture, a shared design for understanding that language just scratches the surface of.

But here's the catch. The very structure of human cognition was designed to limit the fidelity of this communication. In other words, our brain was built with « factory settings » that interfere with our communication.
I’m not talking about people with impaired senses — the blind, the deaf, the mute. I'm talking about built-in miscommunication. Cognitive science has extensively documented the presence of perceptual and interpretive biases that distort input from the environment. These include confirmation bias, egocentric bias, and attribution errors, among others. Such mechanisms filter, reshape, and often misrepresent the messages received from others. Misunderstanding isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.


Humans have come to understand that their words could never fully capture consciousness — not ours, not someone else’s. It could only be a translation, not a direct link. Even when we bare our souls, what the other receives is a filtered version — shaped by their biases, not our truth. 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's the kind of observation that makes me suspect divine mischief when I think about the absurdity of our existence. The idea that someone would design a species to depend on communication for survival while simultaneously limiting its capacity to fully understand others makes for a great drama show. Maupassant captures this tragedy in his short story « Solitude »:

"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."

Yes, it feels like 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. And it is precisely this tension that characterizes human social existence.

You'd think humans would give up on talking to anyone. Well, many do. 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 no.
When they’re misunderstood too often, human beings do not stop communicating: they go inward. They speak to themselves. They write about it, danse, compose, they fall to their knees and pray someone can get it. Maybe the very first prayer wasn't about worship, maybe it was about being heard, being understood. « 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. » continues Maupassant.

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.” A quiet ache that no matter how much you give or receive, something essential is always lost in translation.
Shared experience isn’t enough. Maybe what we’re really after is something deeper — an intuitive knowing, a resonance that goes beyond what we’ve lived and into who we are. Something beyond our own understanding. Some mysterious thread — call it soul, resonance, energy, whatever — something designed into us.

And if that was the case, then maybe designing humans with built-in miscommunication wasn't a cruel joke but a mere reminder for us to meet ourselves within. If we weren't designed as a walking paradox, would we have taken the time to do so ?

That being said, once we look within, the human brain is a whole universe on its own packed into a skull. Even to ourselves, most of it is out of reach. Beneath conscious awareness is 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 — an unconscious well that connects us to more?

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?

Because deep down, we crave to be fully understood, we crave answers too, we crave meaning but no human can offer that. God becomes the ultimate listener. One who sees past bias, past language, into essence. One who knows the parts of us even we don’t.

We perceive a communication from that « bigger » presence too — not just through words, but through symbols, silence, dreams, gut feelings. 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.

Maybe that’s what prayer really is: our last-ditch attempt to communicate across the divide — a monologue aimed at a presence we hope is real. An attempt to connect with something that sees us fully. To be heard by something that might actually understand us — even when we fail to understand ourselves.

This tendency reflects a profound psychological need: to be recognized and responded to, even by entities incapable of true reciprocity.
From a psychological perspective, this may function as a coping mechanism against the existential weight of isolation. And perhaps it is this same hunger — to be seen, to be known without distortion — 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: 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.

But it is also, empty. Because in freeing it from all the flaws that make us fail to understand each other, we also stripped it of the very chaos that gives communication its meaning.

AI doesn’t care to understand. It cannot ache, or yearn, or believe.
And so once again, we’re left with the same silence — this time, 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, maybe soul was the very thing we were trying to be understood through.