I believe direct participatory democracy would be an unmitigated disaster. Governing is very complex and requires advice from people who are expert in each field (economics, medicine, engineering, science, law....) on which a decision is being made. That's what the public/civil service is for. In direct participatory democracy decisions would be made in ignorance of any such advice and would more often than not be catastophic.

I thought you meant what Sophisticat thought you meant. If that's a misinterpretation, it would be helpful if you would clarify what point you were trying to make by bringing America into the discussion. I thought the OP was about Russia.

Is this not quite a sceptical result? That no belief is more credible than any other except in the very weak sense that we believe some things and don't believe others? Perhaps you are happy with this. — PossibleAaran

To use 'credible' in the sense it is used in this quote is to use it in an absolute sense. I see credibility as relative to the person who gives or withholds credence. It is like beauty in that way. I can see no more hope of coming up with a workable notion of mind-independent credibility than of beauty. After all, 'credible' relates to belief, which has no meaning at all in the absence of a mind.

But I don't think that leaves us in a state of sceptical helplessness. I can say that the Creationist story is not credible to me, while Darwin's story is. Further, I can observe that the Creationist story is not credible to most people that have had the benefit of a scientific education.

Another thing we can do is try to analyse what lies behind our confidence in a belief. The first step in that is often that we have to trace it back, working backwards through an implicit deductive process, to find the beliefs from which it was deduced, and then the beliefs from which they were deduced and so on. Continuing in this way, we eventually come to a set of fundamental beliefs that are accepted without proof - things like the principle of induction, the general reliability of my memory and the presence of other minds. I doubt there is anything in my fundamental set of beliefs that any but a tiny minority of the world's population would reject, and I don't think Creationists would reject them either.

But when we do the same with a Creationist, we will generally find some additional fundamental beliefs that I do not hold. Some of them are likely to be about the God they believe in. When those beliefs are put together with the ones we share, they end up having to make strange-seeming deductions in order to keep their system consistent. For example, they deduce that God must have planted fossils in the ground a few thousand years ago, even though the organisms of which they appear to be fossilised remains never lived.

There is nothing wrong with such a belief, but I reject it on aesthetic grounds. I like simplicity and clarity, and such an account takes us very far from such a standard. It raises the question 'Why on Earth would a God do such a thing?'. Now sure any worldview will have plenty of unanswered questions and mysteries, but that approach seems to be just multiplying the mysteries for the sake of it. I like my mysteries to seem natural and inevitable, not contrived - again an aesthetic judgement.

So for me, simplicity and clarity seem to form an important part of what influences the degree to which I find a belief 'credible'.

This is a good question and one I have thought about quite a bit. Probability has a mathematical definition, but it is instrumental, not fundamental, and is of no use in everyday life, or to philosophers.

Where I've ended up at the moment is to use the twin notions of confidence and surprise to make sense of probability. If I say a possible event has a high probability I mean I am very confident it will happen, and that I will not be at all surprised if it does happen, and fairly surprised if it doesn't.

The probability number, between 0 and 1, measures just how confident I am, and just how surprised I would be if it doesn't happen.

'Credibility' is a little more complex, as it can have a specific technical meaning, related to the volume of data on which a belief is based. There is a branch of Actuarial Science known as Credibility Theory, that is rooted in Bayesian analysis. But in the end credibility boils down to another measure of confidence.

What is your take on this? Russia seems to be increasingly concerned that it is not given sufficient importance on the world's stage — Agustino

My view on this changed a few months ago when I looked up Russia's population. I had erroneously believed that Russia's population was 250-300million, which would make it the fourth most populous country on Earth.

To my surprise, I found that its population is less than 150 million. It ranks ninth by population, after China, India, US, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria and Bangladesh. All but two of those eight countries get less attention than Russia in world media and diplomatic negotiations.

If we look by GDP then Russia is twelfth, so even less deserving of superpower status.

The only areas in which Russia currently excels, other than in corruption, computer crime and human rights violations, are land mass, arms manufacturing and size of its nuclear arsenal. I don't see any of those as items that are deserving of special respect.

Any Russians reading, please don't be offended by this. I adore Russian literature, music, dance and science. I live in Australia, which is smaller than Russia in GDP (marginally) and population (by a long way), so we are even less deserving of special attention.

We are, however, the best at cricket.

I understand the appeal of that view, but what exactly happens away from the terminal nodes? How do you decide how to split a nonterminal node into other nonterminal modes? How does 'justice' split? How does 'rationality' split? 'God'? — mrcoffee

The split is determined by the definition used for the word. Every word in the definition that is not already clearly understood gives rise to a new branch leading to a node that is the definition of that word.

I like your choices of other problematic words. All three of those are controversial, and have given rise to great debate over the years. The first part of Plato's Republic is devoted to debate over what Justice is. I find debate over such words as meaningless as debate over the use of 'exist', and I try to avoid use of those words as well. When I do use them, I use them with a meaning I prefer, to which I can give a definition, but it will be a meaning that many people would not accept.

I'll add 'free will' as another example of something that people argue furiously over even though none of them know what they mean by the term. Hume offered a concrete definition that could avoid the confusion, but most philosophers vehemently reject that definition while being unable to offer anything to replace it.

Then, if we look to use for meaning, it must also have a meaning, since it has a use. — mrcoffee

Why do you think that if someone uses a word it must have a meaning?

If we criticize the use of language in the absence of an ideal justification (a definition of exist, for instance), then we are using that same unjustified language to do so, implying that we expect to be understood --implying that we trust the language in practice as we question it in theory. — mrcoffee

When we criticise the use of a certain word or phrase, we are not criticising the language as a whole, just that particular use of it. There's no inconsistency in regarding language use in general as a useful, meaningful activity while criticising the use of certain word or phrases as having no use or meaning. David Borland's advocacy of the language E-Prime exemplifies that attitude and I find it refreshing and helpful.

You asked whether 'hand', 'demand' or 'definition' are as problematic as 'exist'. Empirically they are not, as people tend not to disagree over what they mean, whereas they constantly disagree over what 'exist' means - including non-philosophers. I like to use ostension as the root of meaning - that if we can trace the meaning of a word through a tree whose nodes are various other words until we reach terminal leaves, each of which is given meaning by ostension, then we know what the word means. Otherwise not.

A simpler approach though would be that if everybody agrees on what a word means, and that agreement is borne out by experiment (e.g. Simon says 'raise your hand' and everybody raises their hand), then we can consider that we know the meaning.

They sure hope that there is a right way to transplant a heart, for instance. — mrcoffee

I think they only hope that the operation succeeds. Even if there is a right way to transplant a heart, doing it that way does not guarantee success, which is all the patient cares about. Further, I bet the humans of 500 years' time would say that the way the world's most esteemed heart surgeons currently transplant hearts is the wrong way compared to what they do.

I'm still struggling to see a need for the concept of objectivity. Instead we can just say that as humans we have evolved to instinctively trust what has worked in the past, so we trust surgeons, techniques and theories about how hearts function, that have worked in the past.

I'm not implacably opposed to the concept of objectivity. I'm ready to be convinced of its usefulness. Indeed I used to be a big believer in objectivity, seeing it as a crucial cleaver that cut through, dividing two fundamentally different types of thinking. But I gradually lost that certainty, and now all I see is differing degrees of confidence in beliefs, some of which are hard-wired into us by evolution.

I suppose what I can't see is what philosophical work you see the notion of Objectivity doing. What do we get from calling mathematics Objective that we don't already have and that is available to someone that says mathematics is just a family of language games, with each language game being based on a set of rules agreed by a certain set of people, and that these language games sometimes seem useful in deciding what to do next?

I suspect that the proportion of the population that would agree that a simple mathematical proof is valid will generally be smaller than the proportion that would say that killing an innocent person is wrong, yet we tend to regard the latter as subjective and the former as objective. I find that strange, and hence tend to avoid making subjective/objective distinctions.

Nation-states that have committed crimes such as the Holocaust, the removal of Native Americans, etc. can be trusted with guns, but a private citizen who has committed no crime and just wants a handgun in his nightstand next to his bed for his personal protection cannot?!

Nation states are not trusted with guns. It is just a fact that they have them, and there is nothing we can do about it. A country could unilaterally disarm, but that would merely place it at the mercy of other countries that won't. So Nation states having armed militaries is simply an inevitable fact of life that nothing can be done about, and hence irrelevant to the discussion.

The concern about the gun in the nightstand is not that the owner will use it to kill somebody, so it has nothing to do with trusting the owner. The concern is that a toddler will find the gun, play with it and shoot themselves and/or somebody else, or that a disturbed teenage son will take the gun to his school and start shooting people.

A partial solution to those concerns is for the gun to be locked in a safe. But then it won't be any use against the much-imagined night-time intruder (which in turn makes me wonder why these people don't just buy security doors and window bars).

If 'objective' is interpreted as meaning 'in some sense reliant on human minds' then my belief that 1+1=2 is not an objective belief, because it is based on my having a current memory of having reviewed a proof of the equation, and that memory is dependent on my mind. It could be an implanted memory.

A notion of Strong Objectivity dissolves when one turns the microscope onto it. We can fall back on a notion of Pragmatic Objectivity, which is something like 'most people that have studied the topic would agree'.

The recognition of a pattern of light and dark as an instance of a particular symbol is made explicit in the coding of optical character recognition software. I haven't looked at character recognition programs but I can imagine the sort of rules they'd have. You probably can too, as it sounds like you are doing comp sci. We could define a character 'a' as any pattern of light and dark that satisfies the 'a' test of a certain character recognition program.

Character recognition software is not foolproof but then neither is human character recognition

'Mavis, look at your brother's letter here! Do you think that's an ess or a zed?'

The Alan Watts website makes one part-lecture of about 15 minutes available per week, available as a free podcast through podcasting services. You can set a diary entry to check each week to see if a new one is up and download it if there is one. That way you should be able to accumulate several of his full talks for no cost between now and when you have to go away.

All of which are included in the requirements and obligations of owning a motor vehicle, at least where I live.

A little light relief: Apparently President Trump's idea that to solve gun crime all you have to do is arm everybody else is not new. This clip is from the seventies:

If you are in a coma from which you may awake......would it be moral for me to kill you? — LostThomist

That's not the question you asked. You asked 'can I stab you?', and I answered that question by saying that I would not mind, as long as you succeeded in killing me.

Your new question is more relevant to the topic, so let's look at that. My answer is that, based on my moral framework, which is principally preference utilitarian, and almost certainly different from yours, that would depend on how much emotional harm such an act would cause. You don't need to worry about emotional harm to me, because I won't even know what happened. But you do need to consider the emotional harm to those that care about me. You would need to make the evaluation yourself but I would be surprised if you did not reach the conclusion that such an act would cause significant emotional harm to those that know me as a person and who have come to care for me, and thus that it would be immoral.

Such an evaluation would not apply in the case of an embryo or foetus, as nobody has come to know it as a person. The only possible exception to that is the mother who, for an advanced foetus, may feel a relationship arising from the movements she detects. But since she has the right of veto over abortion (otherwise it will be immoral on everybody's evaluation), that makes it hard to imagine that a voluntary abortion would be immoral on that count.

Well now you have said both.............no double talk.....yes or no? — LostThomist

I'm afraid that line makes no sense to me at all.
If you have an argument to make, please make it and I'll do my best to respond respectfully.

Fie. Only a few posts ago you were complaining - justifiably, I felt - that people had not responded philosophically to your ideas and were just dismissing them with shallow retorts. And yet you dismiss a whole school of thought with this quip?

I would hardly call Singer a philosopher much less sophisticated. — Thomist

What anybody calls him (and some people - mostly those that have never read his work - call him some very horrible things) is of no consequence. What matters is whether they can engage with his ideas - whether to try to rebut them or something else.

So if you are in a coma from which you may awake........can I stab you? — Thomist

As long as you make a clean job of it and finish me off, I would have no complaint to make. In working out whether you feel it is morally permissible however, you would need to take account of the feelings of those that have come to care about me. Even though I am not nearly as widely beloved as Taylor Smith or Beyoncé Noakes, I expect there would be enough people that would be quite upset about it that you would decide that the morally preferable path is to not stab me.

Hello. Well done for acknowledging that it is possible to believe that human life begins at conception but personhood does not. That is the position of some of the more sophisticated philosophers that argue about the permissibility of abortion, such as Peter Singer.

Unfortunately, you did not address the arguments made by Singer and others that we cannot reasonably call an embryo a person. Their argument is essentially that it is a much less significant harm to kill an organism that has no well-developed consciousness, self-awareness, sense of purpose or of the future, than one that does. The section labelled 'LEVEL OF DEVELOPMENT' could have addressed this, but did not do so. The only part that comes close to it is the bit about the super-intelligent aliens killing us. But that would not apply if the threshold for personhood were to be set at some absolute minimum level rather than at a level that is relative to the sophistication of the being that is thinking of doing the killing. I believe the usual utilitarian arguments for permissibility of abortion are based on setting absolute minimum levels for personhood, not relative levels.

But having said that, I do not necessarily disagree that, if super-intelligent aliens were to come to Earth, it would be fair enough for them to kill and eat us. It seems only fair, given how ready humans are to kill and eat other mammals just because they are not as sophisticated as we are.

guns don't kill people, people kill people. This is an empirical fact — Youseeff

No. It's a metaphysical interpretation. Metaphysical interpretations are untestable and unfalsifiable, and hence of no relevance to discussion of public policy.

The point is that in the U.S. the law has been written and interpreted to say that the government has no legal obligation to protect individuals. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

It is your point. It is not a point that anybody else cares much about, because other people care about whether protection is provided, not about whether the law says it is provided.

But now we have people calling for ignoring the dignity of individuals

So far as I can see, nobody has said any such thing. You are the first to mention 'dignity'.

and for the refusal to recognize a human right

It is up to you to make the case that it is a universal human right to own a gun. You have not been successful in making that case.

People need to be consistent: is it about inalienable human rights, or is it about the best utilitarian scheme? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

The inconsistency is between the two sides, not within either of them, which is what one would expect in most debates about most subjects. The pro-gun camp bases its position on its belief in an inalienable human right to own guns. The anti-gun camp is generally concerned with consequences. They want gun control because the evidence strongly shows that it reduces harm. When the anti-gun camp discusses rights, it is because of the pro-gun camp's claim that there is an inalienable human right to own guns. Human rights can sometimes trump consequences, but only if one is convinced that the human right exists. So what the anti-gun camp does is point out that it does not believe the claim that the current legal right is an inalienable human one, and return to its consequentialist argument.

Regarding collective vs individual safety, of course governments mostly favour the former over the latter, and citizens mostly support their doing so. Such a policy approach is generally founded in consequentialism, although it can probably find a home in other ethical frameworks as well. I haven't seen anybody seek to deny that governments take decisions that exhibit that preference, or that people generally support that. Government is hard, and hard decisions need to be taken.

If we were to base public policy on an aim to avoid any individual ever suffering at its hands, we would have no justice system at all, because you cannot have a justice system without it occasionally happening that an innocent individual gets unjustly punished. Which I suppose makes it philosophically consistent for a genuine 100% anarchist to argue against gun control.

Nobody has said anything about the right to sue, so you are attacking a straw man. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Read your own post. In para 5 it says:

If the police fail to protect you, even through sheer incompetence and negligence, don’t expect that you or your next of kin will be able to sue — =WISDOMfromPO-MO

No, what matters is the law. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

We are not going to agree on that.

If whether somebody actually helps you is less important to you than whether some obscure, disregarded piece of legislation says that they were obliged to do so then we are too far apart to hope to bridge the divide.

White people are largely invisible to themselves in a way that different toned ethenticities can never be. — Cavacava

White people may be largely invisible to themselves in SOME parts of the Western world, but you try going to the Middle East and see how "invisible" to yourself you are there. — Agustino

I think this exemplifies a flaw in the English language. I read Cava's statement as meaning 'invisible to each other' - ie their skin colour is invisible to other whites, not as each person being invisible to themself. When you think about it, the way the language works, it can be read either way. But I think in this case, from the context, it meant the former, in which case the response is not applicable, as one's colour being invisible to other whites does not entail its being invisible to non-whites.

English is not the only language with ambiguities like this. I had a strange moment reading Harry Potter in French, in which it said of the students at Smeltings Academy, to which Dudley Dursley goes:

'Les élèves de Smelting avaient également une canne dont ils se servaient pour se taper dessus quand les professeurs ne les voyaient pas.'

That reads as 'the Smeltings students also have a cane which they use to hit themselves when the teachers are not watching', which would be an odd thing to do if one is not an Opus Dei. The original, English version says 'They also carried knobbly sticks, used for hitting each other while the teachers weren't looking.' But in French it is said in the same way as 'hit themselves'. More here.

"Right to sue" is irrelevant guff that, like the book's title, is simply designed to pump sales.

All that matters is: in what proportion of incidents where police were called to protect somebody being attacked, did they refuse to attend?

I suspect the proportion is vanishingly small.

If 'Natural Philosopher' is to indicate an acknowledgement of the entanglement of fact and value on the part of scientists , what name should philosophers give themselves in the age of the end of metaphysics?

It is not intended to indicate that, but rather to just distinguish those that practice science from those that make a gilded idol of it.

People currently called philosophers would then need a prefix or suffix to indicate the type of philosopher they are, eg 'ethical philosopher, 'philosopher of language', etc. In a sense it would be philosophy re-absorbing the activity that is currently labelled science.

I'm interested that you think metaphysics is at an end. Why do you think that? There's certainly a lot of metaphysical discussion and debate goes on here.

What if we returned to the pre-nineteenth century label of 'Natural Philosopher' for people that Do science, and left 'Scientist' for those that worship it.

I quite like the idea of science practitioners being called Natural Philosophers again, like Newton was. Do you think philosophers would object? Would we have a demarcation dispute? Possible strikes? [Hoary old joke looms in memory about the world's philosophers going on strike and nobody noticing. Was that in H2G2?]

In mathematics, a successful definition is one that has the following properties:

1. It is unambiguous. It leaves no room for argument or even discussion about what it means.

2. It is useful for what we are trying to achieve. For instance we could define a zooblad to be any number that, when written out using English words (no numerals), takes a number of characters that is divisible by three. But it is not likely to be useful for any interesting work.

3. Uniqueness. It doesn't use a name that is already used for some other concept that is often used in the same subject area. Mathematics sometimes fails this standard itself. For instance the number of different meanings of 'normal' is staggering.

I suggest the same principles can be applied to definitions in philosophy.

I think it is widely assumed that the de facto philosophy of secular culture is some form of materialism or at least scientific naturalism functioning as normative view. One of the reactions to Nagel's book was by Jerry Coyne, who said 'The view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics must be true unless you’re religious”. That was certainly the view of most of Nagel's critics.

I think you and I agree that Coyne's view, and that of many others like him, is simplistic, dogmatic and unimaginative. It is the view of adherents of Scientism, a type of adherent for which I have yet to find a satisfactory individual noun, since Scientist is already taken and denotes something good. I've toyed with Scientismist, but lately I am more drawn to Science Worshipper. My view as a science enthusiast (but definitely not worshipper) is that Science Worshippers are the worst enemies science has, as they provide validation to idiots like global warming denialists that want to reject science entirely.

Where we differ is in our assessment of how dominant the malaise of Science Worship is. I am less pessimistic than you or Nagel. While there are plenty of SWs around, and they do tend to congregate in certain places, and it may well be the most commonly held worldview in educated, secular society, I think it is a long way short of being a consensus. I seem to constantly encounter educated, science-literate people with all sorts of different approaches to mysticism, spirituality and the ineffable.

What concerns me about Nagel's writing is that he directs his criticism at secular culture, rather than at the prevalence of Scientism within that culture. Hence he implies that Scientism is an irrevocable consequence of secular culture. That creates a great risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Unless we want to turn the ship back towards theocracy and religious intolerance, what is needed is to combat the influence and popularity of Scientism within secular culture, rather than anathematise secularism itself.

If the non-Australians will forgive me for a very parochial diversion, it's a bit like the Liberal party. While my philosophy leans more towards the equality and compassion values that drive the Labor party than the freedom value that drives Liberal, I believe the two-party system is very valuable and wish to see the Liberal party survive, even though I despise the politics of most of its current members, who are really either heartless, reactionary conservatives or heartless, Randian neo-liberals. What I would like to see is the pushback of those influences in the Liberal party - a return to something more like what Malcolm Fraser, Andrew Peacock and John Hewson stood for, rather than the demise of the Liberal party itself. IMHO to seek the demise of the Liberal party is, arguably to threaten democracy while to seek to reduce the influence of the above noxious groups is to strengthen democracy. Substitute secularism for the Liberal Party and Science Worshippers for the conservatives and Randians, and you have my view on scientism in secular culture.

1) There would be a need to "grandfather in" the firearms that are already in the publics hands. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

In general, evidence has shown there is not such a need. Governments introduce buyback programs where there is a limited time frame in which owners of weapons made illegal can sell them to the government, who then destroys them. Here's a wiki page on it.

They work in other countries, albeit with a fair bit of grumbling from the owners.

Whether they would work in a country like the US where a gun has the status of a religious icon is a matter about which I have no idea.

We don't take away EVERYONE's car when one person uses it to kill others either by terrorism or drunk driving. — Harry Hindu

I already covered this above. We DO outlaw the use of certain types of cars on the road that are particularly dangerous and for which there is no persuasive reason to allow people to drive them. And they are outlawed FOR EVERYONE. The examples given were racing cars and monster trucks.

So where is the consistency in your opposing the outlawing of private ownership of the gun equivalents of these - military-style assault rifles, of the kind used in this massacre and the last few before that?

'However what has become very contentious, in current culture, is the view that that the mind, which in some sense must precede science, is believed to be a mere consequence or output of fundamentally physical processes - even though what is ‘fundamentally physical’ is still such an open question.'

As regards Nagel - of course he received scorching criticism for challenging the consensus view, — Wayfarer

Based on @Michael's poll here, only 35% of respondents at this forum were non-skeptical realists, and only 30% were physicalists, so I think Nagel is barking up the wrong tree if he thinks those are consensus positions.

I think there is much more richness and diversity in modern thinking about Life, the Universe and Everything than Nagel is prepared to admit.

E&OE - the percentages may change with new votes since I posted this.

When a person drives drunk and kills someone, we don't blame the booze or the cars. — Harry Hindu

No, but we require somebody to have a licence to drive a car, and we take it away if they are caught driving while intoxicated, or if they are judged mentally unfit to drive. Why then does the US set a lower standard of care for controlling who can use a gun than for who can use a car?

We also register ALL cars and restrict what types of cars may be driven on public roads. For instance racing cars and monster trucks are not allowed, and even cars that are considered ordinary are denied registration if they fail a safety inspection. But no such controls for guns in the US, eh?

If the US regulated the ownership and use of guns similarly to how it regulates that of cars, I doubt it would have had the terrible succession of shootings that it has had.

It is maybe true that the Florida nut might have killed fewer people, but he would have killed using any method he could.

'maybe'?!? Come on, be serious. That 'maybe' is nonsense. Unless he were a ninja, it is inconceivable that he would have killed anywhere near as many people without a gun. That is the whole point.

What would have happened if he had taken a nail bomb instead of a gun?

It will be sensible to discuss things like that if mentally ill students taking nail bombs to their own school ever becomes a problem. As you know, currently it is not, neither in the US, nor in countries that have gun controls. Until then, we might as well discuss what would have happened if he'd paid a Mafia hit man to do the job for him.

What is the relevance of statements like this

I have never said that I agree with people killing others with guns, but people who are going to kill, will kill. — Sir2U

and this

And none of them has had a total success, only reductions in the crime rate.

It looks like an undiluted use of the Nirvana Fallacy. If that's not what you're doing, what possible relevance can those observations have?

I don't think that is a problem (people having different experiences of some empirical phenomena). But we were discussing (pure) geometry, which according to Kant is a science a priori and not empirical. This geometry must be objective (true for all), since it is a priori.

While I don't share Kant's willingness to say what is going on in other people's heads, it at least seems plausible to me that people share a common geometry that they use to process sensory inputs. My suggestion is that geometry would be that of a Riemannian manifold that has no discernible curvature. As mentioned above, one way to axiomatise this is to replace the parallel postulate by one that says that two lines that cross either end of a line segment at angles that are discernibly non-right will intersect within a visualisable distance of the segment.

The space we inhabit has that property.

Kant could not have expressed it this way because the concepts and vocabulary to express it did not exist in his time. Nor were they known to Schopenhauer when he was writing about the parallel postulate. Both Kant and Schopenhauer would have believed that a geometry that matched what we experience was impossible without Euclid's parallel postulate.

It was only with the discoveries of Gauss, Lobachewsky et al, later in the 19th century, that it became apparent that our experience can be matched by a geometry with a less prescriptive version of the postulate, like the one I give above.

I'm very happy to go along with your definition of reality as the phenomena rather than the noumena as, not being a materialist, that is the idea of reality that is most natural to me as well.

With that definition, why do you think there's a problem with the idea that different people have slightly different ways of processing phenomena, even if we describe that as having slightly different empirical realities? To me such a suggestion is not only plausible but seems the most natural thing to assume, even if we had never come across the works of Kant, Gauss, Lobachewsky or Einstein. All it says is that things appear slightly differently to different people. As long as that doesn't lead to conflicting decisions or predictions, there is no difficulty. Where it does lead to conflicting predictions, we say that the person who made the wrong prediction was 'suffering an illusion' (although sometimes it is just an error of calculation instead).

We're talking about how reality happens to be, not how we encounter it in our limited region of space and time — Agustino

I don't agree with the 'In principle it could' claim before this. But I find this quoted bit much more interesting, so I'd like to explore that instead.

My understanding of the TA is that it is not about how reality happens to be but about how humans shape the raw sensory input received into a usable form. I don't see how Kant would be likely to make any claims about how reality happens to be since, for him, reality is noumena, about which we can know nothing.

Can you elaborate about what you mean by this reference to how reality happens to be?