Sentience comes from being embodied. We're not just our brains. The nervous system is intertwined with the rest of the body. There are some thirty million neurons in your gut, and bacteria there can influence your mood. We don't learn about the world primarily from a bunch of tokens. We do so by interacting with our bodies. Language is a kind of additional ability we've developed.
However, you and GP aren't necessarily in disagreement. I believe their main point is that the components that make up intelligence in humans are, of course, just simple phenomena on their own.
