Senses and Thought

There was a section in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" that I could not get out of my head after reading it. Pirsig gave an example of a boy born without any senses to explain different philosophers' views on how the human senses are related to thought. This boy does not have any feeling, taste, sight, hearing, and he cannot speak. He is fed through a feeding tube and is kept alive with the assistance of others. The question that he poses is whether this boy will have any thought. One philosopher felt that he would have no thought, that sensory reception was a necessary precursor for thought. Another philosopher had this idea that there are many things that we can think about that cannot be perceived with any of our four senses, such as time. Both of these views have valid points. I pursued another point of view and asked my friend Keith what he thought about this boy and his thoughts, or lack there of. He believed that this boy would have no thought because he would have nothing to think about. He said the second philosopher's argument did not apply to someone without senses. Time is directly related to senses. You see it when you watch people grow taller and change with age, when the seasons change and when the sun moves across the sky and turns to night. He would not have any thought about time if he has never experienced the results of it. This is a valid point as well. I found this idea so intriguing and I could talk about it all day, but I have not yet made my own philosophical conclusions on this matter.