Dumb question here. I’ve never been in the cockpit of am airliner and I fly quite infrequently, & then mostly on small planes, so I’m guessing that the pilots experience is a little like sitting back in the living room easy chair but wouldn’t there be some physical signs that might give their true situation away?. It should seem to me that at some angle you would know that you were nose up or down or how fast you were falling by the feeling in the proverbial seat of your pants, or in the case of the captain returning to the cockpit having to climb a steep grade if the nose was up or walking down hill if the nose was down. Does this make any sense?.
It has been conclusively shown that you can’t tell from just the seat of your pants what attitude your aircraft is in when it is in an unusual attitude. For example, level acceleration feels just like a pitch-up.