Crippled, yes, but I would disagree that it is fundamentally limited, or that an input stream of human language is inadequate to bootstrap "meaning", or in some way philosophically inferior to native biological senses.
It's very interesting you bring up Helen Keller because she's generally regarded as possessing the same level of sentience - and indeed intelligence - as anyone else, despite the extreme narrowness of her sensory input. It took her much longer to get going, but it's not as if she only understood concepts that directly related to touch. The experience with "water" taught her the concept of a symbol, and from there she could bootstrap everything else. LLMs already work with symbols - that is their sense.
In fact we're all a bit like Helen Keller, in the sense that if sensory input is the basis for our entire world model, then it is a very small foundation supporting an incredibly vast and intricate edifice. There is a considerable abstraction gap between concepts like "capitalism" and any direct sensory input. We all of us, all the time, manipulate concepts without thinking through what they "mean" all the way to something we can see and touch.
It's very interesting you bring up Helen Keller because she's generally regarded as possessing the same level of sentience - and indeed intelligence - as anyone else, despite the extreme narrowness of her sensory input. It took her much longer to get going, but it's not as if she only understood concepts that directly related to touch. The experience with "water" taught her the concept of a symbol, and from there she could bootstrap everything else. LLMs already work with symbols - that is their sense.
In fact we're all a bit like Helen Keller, in the sense that if sensory input is the basis for our entire world model, then it is a very small foundation supporting an incredibly vast and intricate edifice. There is a considerable abstraction gap between concepts like "capitalism" and any direct sensory input. We all of us, all the time, manipulate concepts without thinking through what they "mean" all the way to something we can see and touch.