>When it comes to "understanding of the world", I'd say the average blind person has less. But the gaps in their understanding are generally not particularly im

>When it comes to "understanding of the world", I'd say the average blind person has less. But the gaps in their understanding are generally not particularly important parts. Is understanding of the world equivalent to intelligence though? In my view intelligence is about optimalising the mapping from the percept sequence to action. In other words, given a sequence of percepts, does it determine the utility maximizing action. Imagine two chess bots on uneven footing. One plays regular chess with perfect knowledge of the board. The other plays fog of war chess—it only sees the pieces on squares it attacks. In this case, the former could play suboptimally and still win against the latter. The latter can have perfect information about probabilities of pieces on tiles and act perfectly utility maximising in response and still lose. My argument is that the latter is still more intelligent despite losing. There is a difference between action and intelligence. Similarly a human doesn't become smarter or dumber by adding or removing senses. They may make smarter or dumber decisions, but that is purely attributable to the extra information available to them.