Your brain cut off from any stimulus doesn't "know" either. There are a lot of reasonable arguments to be made against AI, but this isn't one of them.

Tool bad because I used it wrong.

“Know” isn’t a perfectly useful word here. The mind still experiences sans material stimulus, for example dreaming. And it experiences in a progressively less goal/immediate-task-relevant-stimulus manner as stimuli go down (default mode network activity, seen in dreaming, sensory deprivation etc) - i.e. the mind experiences, and processes (dreams about taxes, and so on) independent of the world.