I think you’re starting to conflate emotion with senses.
Yes pain is a form of sensory experience, but it also has affective/emotional components that can be experienced even without the presence of noxious stimuli.
However, there are people that don’t experience pain (congenital insensitivity to pain), which is caused by mutations in the NaV1.7 channel, or in one or more of the thermo/chemo/mechanotransducers that encode noxious stimuli into neural activity.
And obviously, these people who don’t experience the sensory discriminative components of pain are still capable of cognition.
To steelman your argument, I do agree that lacking all but one of what I would call the sufficient senses for cognition would dramatically slow down the rate of cognitive development. But I don’t think they would prohibit it.
Yes pain is a form of sensory experience, but it also has affective/emotional components that can be experienced even without the presence of noxious stimuli.
However, there are people that don’t experience pain (congenital insensitivity to pain), which is caused by mutations in the NaV1.7 channel, or in one or more of the thermo/chemo/mechanotransducers that encode noxious stimuli into neural activity.
And obviously, these people who don’t experience the sensory discriminative components of pain are still capable of cognition.
To steelman your argument, I do agree that lacking all but one of what I would call the sufficient senses for cognition would dramatically slow down the rate of cognitive development. But I don’t think they would prohibit it.