No: machines perform rather than understand maths

Machines only operate on uninterpreted symbols. Even when they perform operations corresponding to addition, they are merely shuffling symbols that are meaningless to them. These manipulations become mathematics only when humans interpret them.

63

Stanley L. Jaki, 1969, Fred Dretske, 1990.

Note: an earlier version of this claim was made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 1930s and published in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956a)

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