Does Thinking Require Sensory Grounding? From ChatGPT to ThinkGPT

Can a being think without ever having sensed anything? I argue that thinking requires mental representation, and that producing representation requires a generative mechanism—one that plays the same functional role as sensory systems, broadly understood. Inferential transitions and similar processes can transmit and transform representational content, but they cannot create it from scratch. This asymmetry entails that pure thinkers—beings with thought but no inputs or outputs, as David Chalmers imagines—are metaphysically impossible. The argument also bears on debates about AI: no amount of inferential sophistication can substitute for the generative mechanisms that make representation possible.