Now I'm imagining a brain in a jar, but with every world-mimicking evolved aspect of the brain removed. Like, it has no implicit knowledge of sound waves or shapes or - well, maybe those low-level things are processed in the ears and retinas, but it has no next-stage anticipation of audio or visual data, either, and no body plan that relates to the body's nerves, and no relationship to digestion or hormones or gravity or jump scares or anything else that would prepare it for being monkey-shaped and living in the world. But, it has the key thing for intelligence, the secret sauce, whatever that is. So it can sit there and be intelligent.

Then you can connect it up to some input and output, and ... it exhibits intelligence somehow. Initially by screaming like a baby. Then it adapts to the knowledge implicit in its input and output systems ... and that's down to the designer. If it has suction cup end effectors and a CCD image sensor array doobrie ... I guess it's going to be clumsy and bewildered. But would it be noticeably intelligent? Could it even scream like a baby, actually? I suppose our brains are pre-evolved to learn to talk. Maybe this unfortunate person would only be able to emit a static hiss. I can't decide if I think it would ever get anywhere and develop appreciable smarts or not.