I think this would depend entirely on how the sensory impairment came about, since most genetic problems are not isolated, but carry a bunch of other related problems (all of which can impact intelligence).
Lose your eye sight in an accident? I would grant there is likely no difference on average.
Otherwise, the null hypothesis is that intelligence (and a whole host of other problems) are likely worse, on average.
This is clearly untrue. All information a human ever receives is through sensory data. Unless your position is that the intelligence of a brain that was grown in a vat with no inputs would be equivalent to that of a normal person.
Now, does rotating a coffee mug and feeling its weight, seeing it from different angles, etc. improve intelligence? Actually, still yes, if your intelligence test happens to include questions like “is this a picture of a mug” or “which of these objects is closest in weight to a mug”.
Entirely possible - we just don’t know. The closest thing we have to a real world case study is Helen Keller and other people with significant sensory impairments, who are demonstrably unimpaired in a general cognitive sense, and in many cases more cognitively capable than the average unimpaired person.
This seems like a very philosophical standpoint, rather than practical. And I guess that’s fine, but I feel like the implication is that if an LLM is in some way intelligent, then it was exactly as intelligent before training. So we are talking about “potential intelligence“? Does a stack of GPU’s have “intelligence”?
I’m trying to illustrate that the constraints that apply to LLMs don’t necessarily apply to humans. I don’t believe human intelligence is reliant upon sensory input.
The term cannot mean something measurable or concrete when it’s convenient, but be vague and indefinable when it’s not.