IMHO, it's a typical philosophizing. Feedback is definitely crucial, but whether it needs to be in the form of embodiment is much less certain.
Brain structures that have arisen thanks to interactions with the environment might be conductive to the general cognition, but it doesn't mean that they can't be replicated another way.
Why are we homo sapiens self-aware?
If evolutionary biologists are correct it’s because that trait made us better at being homo sapiens.
We have no example of sapience or general intelligence that is divorced from being good at the things the animal body host needs to do.
We can imagine that it’s possible to have an AGI that is just software but there’s no existence proof.
> Why are we homo sapiens self-aware? ... We can imagine that it’s possible to have an AGI that is just software but there’s no existence proof.
Self-awareness and embodiment are pretty different, and you could hypothetically be self-aware without having a mobile, physical body with physical senses. E.g., imagine an AGI that could exchange messages on the internet, that had consciousness and internal narrative, even an ability to "see" digital pictures, but no actual camera or microphone or touch sensors located in a physical location in the real world. Is there any contradiction there?
> We have no example of sapience or general intelligence that is divorced from being good at the things the animal body host needs to do.
Historically, sure. But isn't that just the result of evolution? Cognition is biologically expensive, so of course it's normally directed towards survival or reproductive needs. The fact that evolution has normally done things a
And it's not even fully true that intelligence is always directed towards what the body needs. Just like some birds have extravagant displays of color (a 'waste of calories'), we have plenty of examples in humans of intelligence that's not directed towards what the animal body host needs. Think of men who collect D&D or Star Trek figurines, or who can list off sports stats for dozens of athletes. But these are in environments where biological resources are abundant, which is where Nature tends to allow for "extravagant"/unnecessary use of resources.
But basically, we can't take what evolution has produced as evidence of all of what's possible. Evolution is focused on reproduction and only works with what's available to it - bodies - so it makes sense that all intelligence produced by evolution would be embodied. This isn't a constraint on what's possible.