Not even convinced that there is much point given the present state of knowledge about the world. Although I grant that it might have been different for Plato, who had a big brain - but not a lot of data to connect it to.
Notwithstanding, for some reason, it sprang into my mind yesterday that in so far as colour was concerned the answer to the question was a clear 'no'.
The way we perceive colour clearly depends our having complicated eyes wired into complicated brains. The colour 'red' has no existence outside of human brains, excepting possible those lower animals which still have decent eyes and brains of a sort.
It may well be that objects which we see as red reflect or absorb the light hitting them in different way to object that, for example, we see as blue, but that is not the same thing at all.
Properties like size or temperature are a bit different, as while the senses help, we can't sense either size or temperature in the fine grained way that we sense colour - and for that we need instruments.
While a property like surface texture is different again, with different surfaces feeling very different to the fingers, but with instruments capable of doing the same job having only recently become available.
So roughly speaking, the objects might exist whether we are there or not - but the properties, the subjective experiences, through which we know of them, know about them do not. We know about how the objects interact with us, not about what they are. And as anthropologists (and probably psychiatrists) know all too well, you change what you interact with.
Clearly a topic to mull over during the morning's brick shift to come. In the intervals of thinking about whether it should be rows, stacks or what.
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