[barrkel]

Comprehend, from com- ("together" or "with") and prehendere ("to seize" or "grasp"). To take a hold of.

Can a calculator comprehend arithmetic? Can it take a hold of a number (in a register, for example), and a second number, and add them together to get a hold of the result?

What is computation, really? When we design machines to do arithmetic, do the machines actually do arithmetic, or do they just coincidentally come up with states that we humans can interpret as a correspondence with arithmetic?

More importantly, would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

If you put a problem into text, and give it to an LLM, and an LLM applied a series of higher order pattern matching to it to produce more text, and you read the resulting text and interpret it as reasoning about the solution to a problem, has the LLM reasoned? Does the calculator calculate? Or does it really matter?