I think part of the issue arises from the fact that the result of the arithmetic of numbers is nearly completely divorced from any semantic information containe

I think part of the issue arises from the fact that the result of the arithmetic of numbers is nearly completely divorced from any semantic information contained in the preceeding numbers. It's a big reason LLMs struggle with arithmetic (although gpt-4 is competent at it now). Take the sentence, "John is smiling and is therefore ----". It's not hard to grasp that the missing word is probably happy. Why ? Well all the information you need to make that calculation is embedded in previous context. It's pretty easy. Now take the problem 54859 + 494785 = ? Unlike the above, 54859 and 494785 don't actually tell you anything at all about how to perform addition. The arithmetic of addition (any arithmetic pretty much) is completely divorced from the problem statement. also. it's not like your brain evolutionarily ever had a need to intuit numbers spatially divorced.