Conscience: The Universal Translator

On first tasting a dragon fruit your mind says “a bit like kiwi, but softer” — that is, you translate an experience of the outer world into the language of your inner world. After a few repetitions the fruit becomes a new reference in its own right; you now describe lychee by way of it. Your inner world has widened by one new unit of meaning. From here the piece moves to the distinction between theoretical and practical reason: someone who has never been burned can calculate heat transfer, yet receives no warning signal before the skin even reaches the stove. The saying attributed to Feynman — “if you can't explain it simply, you haven't understood it” — and his “imagine you are an electron” lessons are precisely the work of building intuition. The same structure explains why we are anthropomorphic: even supposedly objective concepts like “motion” derive from the walking of our own legs. Superposition, entanglement and eleven-dimensional spacetime feel alien to us; we grasp their mathematics (theoretical) but cannot feel them (practical). This is no deficiency — divine wisdom too uses this same mechanism of translation in reaching man. Bediüzzaman's fourth proof describes conscience as the isthmus between the unseen and the witnessed.

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Conscience: The Universal Translator

On first tasting a dragon fruit your mind says “a bit like kiwi, but softer” — that is, you translate an experience of the outer world into the language of your inner world. After a few repetitions the fruit becomes a new reference in its own right; you now describe lychee by way of it. Your inner world has widened by one new unit of meaning. From here the piece moves to the distinction between theoretical and practical reason: someone who has never been burned can calculate heat transfer, yet receives no warning signal before the skin even reaches the stove. The saying attributed to Feynman — “if you can't explain it simply, you haven't understood it” — and his “imagine you are an electron” lessons are precisely the work of building intuition. The same structure explains why we are anthropomorphic: even supposedly objective concepts like “motion” derive from the walking of our own legs. Superposition, entanglement and eleven-dimensional spacetime feel alien to us; we grasp their mathematics (theoretical) but cannot feel them (practical). This is no deficiency — divine wisdom too uses this same mechanism of translation in reaching man. Bediüzzaman's fourth proof describes conscience as the isthmus between the unseen and the witnessed.

Felsufi·7 min read·2025-11-09·View on Medium ↗

The text below is Felsufi's own essay in reading and reflection. It may carry approaches that differ from classical tafsīr — Sufi interpretation, synthesis with modern science, the Risale-i Nur perspective. Because it is the author's personal ijtihād, alternative classical readings exist; this text makes no claim to a single correct reading — it offers a perspective.

The first time you taste a dragon fruit your mind sets to work at once: “A bit like kiwi, but softer… a texture somewhere between pear and watermelon.” In fact you are not merely describing — you are translating an experience of the outer world into the language of your inner world. And the concept of conscience in the literature carries something of this sense.

This is fundamentally how human comprehension works. Every new experience, every new concept or truth, passes first through the door of our inner world — that vast accumulation of sensations, feelings and concepts we have been gathering since the day we were born.

How the inner world widens
TRIGGER
The first taste
The dragon fruit fits nowhere; the mind urgently seeks a translation.
STATE
Description by existing units
“Like kiwi, but softer… between pear and watermelon.” The experience is rendered into the references at hand.
STATE
Repetition
After eating it a few more times something changes: it ceases to be “kiwi-ish.”
STATE
A new reference
It becomes a new reference in its own right. Now you can describe lychee as “a bit like dragon fruit.”
OUTCOME
Widening
Your inner world has widened by one new unit of meaning.
❝

In fact you are not merely describing — you are translating an experience of the outer world into the language of your inner world.

— Felsufi

The Two Faces of Knowledge: Knowing and Feeling

Yet not every understanding stands at the same degree. Here lies a deep difference between theoretical and practical reason. A person who has never been burned can learn heat transfer, can read the temperature warnings, can even calculate at what degree the tissue will be damaged. By theoretical reason he arrives at the judgement: “I must not touch what is hot.” True — but this knowledge is like an equation on paper; correct, yet cold, void of feeling.

The same judgement, two reasons
Theoretical reason
It draws the form of the truth, yet cannot make it felt.
It learns heat transfer and calculates the degree of harm
The judgement is correct, yet like an equation on paper
→The difference is this: theoretical reason draws the form of the truth but cannot make it felt; practical reason engraves knowledge upon the body, the emotions and the intuition.
Practical reason
It engraves knowledge upon the body, the emotions, the intuition (ḥads).
As the hand nears the stove a warning signal arrives before the skin even touches
Knowledge living not in the mind alone but in the body and the feelings
It carries the power to transform behaviour instantly

The Feynman Principle

❝

“If you cannot explain a concept simply, you have not really understood it.”

— Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman was someone who grasped this difference intuitively; his aim was not memorisation but comprehension. The famous physicist never began a lesson with equations. He would build analogies along the lines of “imagine you are an electron…” or “think of space as a rubber sheet…” By bringing quantum mechanics close to the senses — however metaphorical the means — he built an intuition (ḥads) in his listener. After hearing him you began to understand physics not by formulae alone but by feeling it from within.

How practical reason operates
This is how practical reason operates: to settle knowledge within the inner world — to make it not a guest there but a householder.

The Anthropomorphic Lens: The Spectacles We Cannot Remove

This need for felt understanding also explains why we are anthropomorphic by our very nature. When we see human attributes in what is not human we call it anthropomorphism: “an angry storm,” “a stubborn computer.” But the truth runs far deeper: even supposedly “objective” concepts such as “motion,” “growth” and “flight” in fact rest upon man's own sensory experience.

Three layers of the concept *“motion”*
Even the concept we take to be most objective derives from an inner sensation
The physical definition
The evolution of a quantum wave function in time
Yet you do not feel the wave function
The inner sensation
What you feel is the walking of your legs, the reaching of your hand
This sensation becomes a template for understanding all motion in the universe
Solidification
Through repetition the inner simulations solidify and begin to appear as fixed “realities” out there
A child first learns running with his own legs; then he sees the dog run, the water flow, the time pass
The concept comes to feel so universal that we forget it is at bottom a personal experience

The Point Where Meaning Breaks

Concepts with and without a counterpart in the inner world
Those with a counterpart
Concepts that can be bound directly to an inner sensation.
Motion, growth, flight — each has a template in the body
They are both known and felt
→This is why they remain always distant, reachable only through metaphor. That quantum mechanics feels “alien” is not a want of information but the absence of a translation.
Those without one
Concepts that find no direct counterpart in our inner world.
Superposition, entanglement, wave-particle duality
The eleven-dimensional spacetime of string theory
We grasp the mathematics (theoretical reason) but cannot feel it (practical reason)

A Bridge to Divine Understanding

This structure of human comprehension — the need to grasp truth not by thinking alone but by feeling — is no deficiency, but on the contrary the very property that makes real understanding possible.

وَلِلّٰهِ الْمَثَلُ الْاَعْلٰى وَهُوَ الْعَزِيزُ الْحَكِيمُ

16:60

“… for the highest similitude belongs to God; and He is the Mighty, the Wise.” — The word of the verse is mathal: similitude, likeness, parable. The highest likeness belongs to Him.

When divine wisdom wishes to reach human consciousness, it employs this very mechanism of translation. The author of the Risale-i Nur, who renders abstract truths of faith concrete through short representative stories, through analogies, explains the ground of this by way of the concept of conscience.

❝

The fourth proof: The point of junction of the world of the unseen and the world of the witnessed, the isthmus between them, and the meeting-place of the travellers passing from each world to the other, is the conscious nature called conscience. Yes, innate nature and conscience are a window onto the intellect; they diffuse the rays of divine unity. … Even if the intellect suspends its work and neglects its gaze, the conscience cannot forget the Maker. Though it deny its own self, it sees Him, it thinks of Him, it is turned toward Him. Intuition — which is a lightning-swift transition — moves it constantly. And inspiration, the multiple of intuition, illumines it always.

— Bediüzzaman — Mesnevî-i Nûriye, Nokta
Not a reduction but an accommodation
That divine address should come in a language proper to man is not a reduction; it is a gracious accommodation to the structure of human comprehension. God speaks with man through an anthropomorphic language — for what transforms hearts is not thought alone but knowledge felt, engraved upon the body, lived — that is, practical reason.
Related reading, and about this text
The discussion of “concepts that cannot be felt” touches directly on The Quantum Chapter of the Book of the Universe-1 on this site: the five mysteries listed there (superposition, entanglement, the measurement problem…) are precisely instances of the absent translation described here. The piece's URL on Medium carries the title “The Inner World: Our Universal Translator”; the published title is “Conscience: The Universal Translator.” The Turkish is the author's own pen; the English is a translation.
✦With Gratitude to the Author

This essay appears on QuranCodex with the verbal permission and generosity of Felsufi. All interpretations and syntheses reflect the author's personal reflection; QuranCodex carries these texts respectfully as an invitation to think. The original text is published on Medium.