When you take a university / school course, how is that functionally different from curve fitting? Given that arbitrarily complex states can be modeled as high-dimensional curves, all learning is clearly curve fitting, whether in humans, machines, or even at the abiological level (for example, self optimizing processes like natural selection). Even quantum phenomema are -- at the end of the day -- curve fitting via gradient descent (hopefully it's had enough time to settle at a global minima!)