[emp17344]

It’s unlikely that sensory data contributes to cognitive ability in humans. People with sensory impairments, such as blind people, are not less cognitively capable than people without sensory impairments. Think of Helen Keller, who, despite taking in far less sensory information than the average person, was still more intelligent than average.

[skeledrew]

Without sensory data there cannot be actual cognitive ability, though there may be potential for it. The data doesn't have to be visual; bear in mind we have 5 senses. When vision is impaired, hearing becomes far more sensitive to compensate. And theoretically, if someone were to only have use of a single sense, they may still be able to use the data from it to actualize their cognition, but it would take a lot more effort and there would be large gaps in capability. Just as, technically, preprocessed vision* is the primary "sense" of LLMs.

* Preprocessed since the data is actually of 1D streams of characters, and not 2D colour points (as with vision models).