The paper also fails to show that their central example, Einstein, relied on sensory experience for his intuition leaps rather than general reasoning. They just kind of claim that thought experiments require sensory experience. But you can easily ask an LLM to perform a thought experiment and simulate an outcome, and the SOTA LLMs generally seem to do about as well as a human. An LLM would certainly know that freefall feels the same as zero gravity, even if they haven't felt the sensation, which was the key intuition the paper talks about for Einstein's General Relativity. The paper's author would probably say any examples of this don't count, but without clear criteria for what would count, their claim is unfalsifiable.