> having a body

You do not need sensorial feedback to do math. And you do not need full sensors to have feeback - one well organized channel can suffice for some applications.

You need sensor feedback to learn new math and talk to other mathematicians.

To learn new math, a professional mathematician foremostly just thinks further (it's its job); to discuss with other entities (and acquire new material), textual input and outputs suffice.

Hmm, the ones I know do a fair amount of multimodal discussion. (Shapes for instance.)

Which you can still acquire as compact data (like SVG)

Which to machines is direct information, as opposed to noisy data requiring complex processing to extract the relevant content.

You might get a kick out of this essay by Robert Epstein from 2016: https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati... (The empty brain - Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer)

There is a whole genre of essays like this talking about behaviour in a human specific way. But, I wish they engaged with the notions of the Church-Turing thesis and the Universal Turing Machine which indicates that any behaviour following standard physics principles is in fact computable.

(FWIW, I dont think that humans can be reduced to computing, but the Church-Turing thesis is a powerful counterargument which more biologists and psychologists should engage with).

I stopped reading before reaching 2/3 of it but the start is already strawman after strawman (or misunderstanding to be generous).

I don’t think most people believe the brain is made up of a discrete Processing part that accesses information from a memory part that’s encoded in binary there. But just because the brain doesn’t contain a literal encoding of something in binary doesn’t mean the neurons don’t store the information.

If you download the weights of an LLM, you’re not going to find the text it can output „from memory“ anywhere in the file, but the weights still encode the information and can retrieve it (with some accuracy).

Maybe I misunderstood it, but I feel that it's a weird article, because it fails to establish any vocabulary and then seem to uses words in uncertain ways, as if constructing the narrative by specifically crafting (but never truly explaining/define) some model that's not true, but presenting the argument with significantly expanded scope. Drastically reduced (which is not really correct, but may help me to convey my general impression/feelings only) it's kinda sorta like-ish "we aren't doing it the way our computers do, thus the information processing metaphor is wrong".

Like when talking about that experiment and an image of the dollar bill, it never talks about what's an "image", just states that there wasn't one stored in a brain, in "any sense". And then goes on describing the idea that seem to match the description of a "mental image" from cognitive science.

As I [very naively] get it... Information theory is a field of mathematics. Unlike all those previous concepts like humours, mechanical motions or electric activities, math is here to establish terminology and general principles that don't have to fundamentally change if^W when we learn more. And that's why it got stuck.

This has been pursued by researchers like Rodney Brooks. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition

So quadriplegics aren't sentient ?

Your statement, not mine. And I wrote intelligence, not sentience.

People who become quadriplegic as adults (or older children) have already developed intelligence before.

My theory (which I have not researched in any way) implies that someone born fully quadriplegic would be severely impaired in developing intelligence. Sight and hearing are of course also important sources of feedback, the question is whether they are sufficient.

Have you ever read about Hellen Keller and her experience before her discovery (being taught) language

Only about how she experienced that discovery.

But then, she lost her sight and hearing at the age of 19 months, so after lots of cognitive development had only taken place.