My sister isn't blind. H isn't my sister, she's a friend of my sister as I wrote.
Do you have concrete justification for your insistence that "embodied experience is far more necessary" ?
Much like when humans started experimenting with flight we tried to make flapping things like birds, but in the end it turns out spinning blades gives us capabilities above and beyond bodies that flap.
Back to the embodiment problem. For us as humans we have limits like only having one body. It has a great number of sensors but they are still very limited in relation to what reality has to offer, hence we extend our senses with technology. And with that there is no reason machine intelligence embodiment has to look anything like ours. Machine intelligence could have trillions of sensors spread across the planet as an example.
It's an ironically apt analogy, because ChatGPT has the linguistic understanding of an entity that is deaf, dumb, blind, and has no working senses of any kind, and instead relies on a golem-like automated mass of statistics with some query processing.
We tend to project intelligence onto linguistic ability, because it's a useful default assumption in our world. (If you've ever tried speaking a foreign language while not being very good at it, you'll know how the opposite feels. Humans assume that not being able to use language is evidence of low intelligence.)
But it's a very subjective and flawed assessment. Embodied experience is far more necessary for sentience than we assume, and apparent linguistic performance is far less.