A given string of bits is meaningless in itself. It gets its meaning from its context, usually in a data structure, just as a letter in a book gets its meaning from the word in which it appears, and the word gets its meaning from the sentence that contains it, and so on. Individual bits, letters, and words are meaningless in themselves. They are symbols . They get their meaning from the way that they are used.
Computation is the mechanical manipulation of symbols .
You are free to see the computation as meaningful, but the computer is simply a machine that does what it is programmed to do.