The Relativity of Consciousness

An idea from Einstein, applied to God, free will, and what makes us human

Both of Einstein’s theories of relativity rest on a way of recognizing concepts that exist only in our mental models and not in reality. The same approach can help us when we try to reason about God. As I showed in my other article, grounding our observations about God in reality lets us avoid theological explanations that stand only on themselves and never quite escape the world of natural language — the kind that many technically minded people dismiss as “just words,” which they indeed are. Einstein’s principle can be stated as follows:

Whenever no action, no imaginable experiment even in principle, could distinguish two concepts, those two concepts are in fact one thing with two names.

This is how it applies in the Special Theory of Relativity:

No action, no imaginable experiment even in principle, can distinguish a body at rest from a body moving in a straight line at constant speed. So “being at rest” and “moving uniformly” are not two states of the world but one thing with two names. There is no absolute rest and no absolute velocity; motion exists only as a relation between bodies.

In plain terms: if you move away from a friend at constant speed, he can just as well say that he is the one moving away while you stay still. No experiment could settle which of you is right — and that is the whole point. Both descriptions are equally valid.

This is how it applies in the General Theory of Relativity:

No experiment confined to a small enough region can distinguish standing still in a gravitational field from being uniformly accelerated through empty space. So “gravity” and “acceleration” are one thing with two names — which is why the gravitational mass that gives a body its weight is identical to the inertial mass that resists its being pushed.

In plain terms: when an elevator accelerates upward, you feel pressed into the floor, heavier than before — exactly as you would if gravity had suddenly grown stronger. Nothing you could measure inside the elevator would tell the two apart. That is what it means for gravity and acceleration to be indistinguishable.

In the theological context, let’s start with a simple question and work toward more consequential ones.

Some people ask: how can God be omnipotent if He cannot act against His own will?

This is a more sophisticated variant of the old puzzle about whether God can create a stone too heavy for Him to lift. Let me remind you of the motivation behind this exercise: to step out of purely logical constructions and ground our thinking in reality, by at least imagining a real action — an experiment in the real world. So we won’t argue over whether it is logically possible to willingly do what one does not will, or whose will it would even be, if anyone’s. Let’s instead imagine that God does something against His will — which means something not good, since the God we hope in is good at all times.

In that case, if any human ever experienced such an act or learned of it, he would not attribute it to God at all; and if he did, he would assume he had misunderstood, and be left confused. So it makes no sense to entertain the possibility of God acting against His will: such a God never manifests in the world. For us, a good God who can act against His will is never distinguishable from one who cannot, so any discussion of it can only live in the world of words, not in reality.

And in fact we did not work out that God is good and omnipotent on our own. We know it because He chose to reveal it to us. If we don’t accept revelation as a source of knowledge in its own right, there is no reason left to believe a good God exists at all.

The first question cost no lives. The following one cost many.

Some people ask: if God sees the world in a timeless fashion, must He not know from the very beginning of our lives who will be damned and who will not?

Those who entertain this question often go on to ask whether God can reasonably expect us to obey authorities who are amoral and corrupt, merely on the slim chance that they might one day repent — which they most likely never will. Such men, the reasoning goes, have forfeited any rightful claim on our obedience — so why respect them?

This was the argument made by Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1415 for stubbornly refusing to recant it. In his day there was a pope and two anti-popes, and he was right about the morality of the men in high places. Yet to accept such reasoning as legitimate teaching would, in the eyes of the authorities, mean the decay of society: popular uprisings by illiterate peasants who believed they understood enough to take matters into their own hands. But you cannot burn an idea at the stake, and what followed was exactly what they had feared. Some historians even trace a line from the upheaval Hus set in motion to the Thirty Years’ War, which in some regions of Europe killed as much as 40% of the population.

The flaw in the reasoning behind the so-called question of predestination is this: one can speculate, in the medium of natural language and logic, about how God perceives time — but in reality God never does anything that would reveal He already knows what the future holds. Imagine what a world would look like in which some people were visibly God’s favorites while others were born losers from the start. What would such a world teach you? What effect would it have on the exercise of your free will? It would be an evil world from the very beginning. Maybe this is why you sometimes see people get second chances — even twenty-second chances — from God, people you are all but certain will never take one up. It can look unfair, but it is not: it is how God signals to you, personally, through real events (not logic), that sanctity is always a goal worth striving for. God does not act as though our fates were sealed in advance, so the question of whether He truly sees things in a timeless fashion is itself predestined never to leave the world of words.

The first half of the third question has already cost many millions of lives; the second half may cost many millions more in the time to come.

Some people ask: if humans are just biological machines, can non-biological machines be conscious too?

There is no experiment, even in principle, that could prove a machine has consciousness — an inner experience even remotely resembling ours: that sense of living from inside our own heads.

Today’s popular AI, built on large language models, can mimic consciousness well enough that people may be tricked into thinking they are talking to a human. But no matter how far we progress technologically, there will never be a human on the other side, and that is always provable by a trivial experiment: a data center can be told apart from a human easily enough, and even a perfect imitation of mind will always be just a sophisticated trick.

But the same reasoning can be turned the other way. If you cannot tell the difference between a mind and its simulation, is there anything at all that makes us humans — as biological machines — a special case? In fact, there is no experimental proof that we are special, just as there is no experimental proof that a good and omnipotent God exists. We know both only because they were revealed to us by God.

And here is the consequence that may be very hard to stomach: if we do not accept revelation as a genuine source of knowledge in its own right, then once some of us attain superhuman abilities, there is no reason why they should treat ordinary humans any better than we treat animals. It is exactly this Darwinian view — the struggle between groups of humans — that fueled the Holocaust; only this time the claimed ground of superiority will not be culture, but technology.

So it can be seen more clearly in this age than ever before: either you reject God — whom we came to know through revelation — and your worldview inevitably drifts toward alignment with that of Adolf Hitler; or you reject this evil Darwinian view, in which case you either become Catholic or the burden falls to you to show that you reject it for some reason other than an implicit acceptance of revelation as a genuine source of knowledge in its own right.

I don't think the latter can be done by logic or experiment.