Allan Crossman: "If a machine can be consistently interpreted as "doing addition", doesn't that indicate that there are intrinsic facts about the machine that have something to do with addition?"

The same physical process, as a computation, can have entirely different semantics depending on interpretation. That already tells you that none of those interpretations is intrinsic to the physical process.

Caledonian: "We don't need a mind to perceive meaning in a pattern of electrical impulses generated by a circuit for that circuit to perform arithmetic. As long as the circuit enforces the correct relationship between input and output values, it implements the mathematical operation defined by that relationship."

See previous comment. There is a physical relationship between inputs and outputs, and then there is a plethora of mathematical (and other) relationships which can be mapped onto the physical relationship.

One may as well say that the words in a natural language intrinsically have certain meanings. If that were true, it would literally be impossible to utilize them in some inverted or nonstandard way, which is false.