I have rethought what you have said, and I think I am now closer to understanding what your question is. You are posing the question of what to do with an inpu

I have rethought what you have said, and I think I am now closer to understanding what your question is. You are posing the question of what to do with an input, not the operation itself. For instance, if I feed the network an image of 5 and 3, with the output being the image 8, the network would not perform addition but some other functional mapping. Is that the feature you are suggesting that it should 'understand'?