This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?

We are not thinking machines.

If believing absurd falsehoods increase the odds of getting laid or avoiding predators, your brain will believe those falsehoods with all its metaphorical little heart.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.