alt Hacker News> any evidence that a brain couldn't exist or develop in a jar
The brain could. Of course it could. It's just a signals processing machine.
But would it be missing anything we consider core to the way humans think? Would it struggle with parts of cognition?
For example: experiments were done with cats growing up in environments with vertical lines only. They were then put in a normal room and had a hard time understanding flat surfaces.
https://computervisionblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/cats-and...
This isn't remotely a hypothetical, so I imagine there are some examples out there, especially from back when polio was a problem. Although, for practical reasons, they might have had limited exposure to novelty, which could have negative consequences.