Actual Infinities

[I_am_not_mafia]

An object can only be capable of being known if there is an observer capable of knowing about it.

Do objects possess any qualities absent of perception or do such properties, whether primary or secondary, subsist only in the knower? If they exist solely in the knowing subject and not in the known object, then what is an object and in what way do these exist outside of the mind?

Knowing is an act. Therefore by definition you need something to act in order to know.

Known is a property of something that can know something.

Take intelligence for example. You can only be as intelligent as your environment allows. If you take an ordinary baby and grow it in a sensory deprivation chamber with life support tubes, then 30 years later take it out, you're not going to have an intelligent human at the end of it.

Take that same baby and educate them and test all forms of their intelligence to the extent of their ability every waking moment of their lives then 30 years later you'll have someone who is remarkably intelligent.

The same applies regardless of whether we are situated agents or brains in a vat. It all depends on what signals are being passed into our brains and whether the signals passed out of it can shape the next set of input signals.

In terms of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, our brains are just a particularly ordered island of complexity within a larger self organising system.

If qualities such such as shape, extension, location, etc. are intrinsic to the nature of objects that exist in an external void, known or otherwise, then they possess distinct features from which logical principles necessarily follow. Thus, humans didn't "invent" reason, they discovered it through the intellectual faculty categorizing sense data of external properties. Similarly, the rules that govern mathematical relationships are known as a result of discovery by the intellect in the same way that knowledge of external objects is acquired through such senses as "sight" or "touch". It isn't necessarily the case that I'm not a brain in a vat, but I see no reason to begin with that premise.

Humans invented the scientific method and it's still being finessed today. Humans invented logic. There are many different forms of logic that have been invented to try and deal with situations where previous forms of logic have failed. For example, fuzzy logic. They also invented Maths. There are many arbitrary rules in Maths that show that it was invented and new forms of Maths are being invented today for specific purposes. In the same way that new computer algorithms are being created for specific purposes.

If you wiped out the human race then all those frameworks would also be wiped out.