[TeMPOraL]

> the evolutionary forces that operate in the real world, where there are no boundaries between the different sensory stimuli that animal nervous systems must learn to distinguish and manipulate.

Yup, and evolution spent millions of years to properly figure that out.

And "no boundaries between the different sensory stimuli" doesn't even look like a hard problem. If anything, the tricky bit was to identify what's useful to sense, and to make the hardware for it - which is something evolution has been figuring out since the first replicator, and it identified half of the useful senses even before multicellular life became a thing. At this point, the boundaries are already established - you have different types of sensors producing correlated, but still quite distinct signals. It's not that hard to keep those feeds separated.