I'm inclined to agree that it likely is necessary for general intelligence. It's like the Mary's Room thought experiment. You don't understand what the color re

I'm inclined to agree that it likely is necessary for general intelligence. It's like the Mary's Room thought experiment. You don't understand what the color red is if you've never seen it, no matter how well you understand the abstract concept of red. An AI can never truly understand the physical world without direct experience of it. Now, I believe you probably could build something that could be called an AGI without embodiment, but it would be greatly limited by its lack of experience of the physical.