Look, I love getting philosophical. Really, I do. My friends are so used to it that when I enter a conversation with "Well you might say..." they immediately start throwing objects at my head. Let none say that Ravi has ever backed down from an opportunity to get jiggy with definitions.
But.
Are you 100% confident that the difference between me having a brilliant idea for a fun game with my laser pointer and the me 5 minutes later experiencing a clarity of hindsight my natural vision will never again supply me is remotely comparable to the difference between, say, me and you? Or even me two years in the future? There is obviously a working definition of "same person" here!
Like listen, you can absolutely say that we aren't the same person in the morning that we were before going to bed the previous night. Or going through anesthesia. Or forming new memories, or existing at all as the persisting pattern of our bodies churns through the atoms momentarily instantiating it. No man steps in the same river twice, yada yada yada.
But the article is not making a philosophical argument about what the self truly is. It is positing (or raising the question in an annoyingly leading way, whatever) that intelligence is embodied definitionally. Like literally impossible without specifically the meat grubbers evolution endowed you and I with. There is absolutely no way to go from "we are all one universe" to "no machine learning system will ever be truly intelligent until it's within my chosen specialty of robotics", which is what 14 roboticists said in unison when Times interviewed them. So even if we need to invent new words for the sense in which I am the xchnople as a blind me, so you can keep "same" for whatever you're using it for, there's really no way in which it can swing the question of whether a body is required for specific, empirical aspects of cognition.