Who needs to snap out of it? Me or them? — frank

Maybe there is truth in both views given that we humans are both biologically and culturally evolving animals.

So yes. The naturalistic lens applies overall. But humans have also gone beyond conventional nature if we are talking about straight biological/ecological level evolutionary games. We have added social and even artifactual levels of developmental outcomes.

We are socially constructed - which means morality is "real' in some stronger sense. We can do weird things like decide to be vegetarian because we feel there is some more generic principle at stake. And then there is a whole realm of machinery and technology that we are unleashing that may become its own still higher level evolutionary game.

So naturalism rules. But naturalism is also creatively open-ended. And humans ceased to be merely biological organisms as soon as they developed symbolic speech and opened up all the creative possibilities that entailed.

Who needs to snap out of it? Me or them? — frank

No one. It's not like your idea is different from their idea. You guys are looking at different angles of the same elephant.

R. D. Laing made the case in his book The Divided Self (which explores the developmental phenomenology of psychological phenomena, such as psychosis, schizophrenia and schizoid disorder) that psychiatry (at the time, and actually today still as well) treats patients as "things". They are not people, they are objects to be poked and prodded and evaluated as one would poke and prod and evaluate an impersonal object as the natural sciences do.

However, at the same time, we cannot deny that humans are indeed primates. They have squishy internal organs, hidden away in the dark behind a thin, fleshy coat. We die after ~75 years or so. The reality of this seems to only really come into our awareness either when we are explicitly investigating it as curious scientists or when part of our body starts to hurt.

Like said, it seems to me like the truth is a little bit of both. The troubling aspect, though, is that the personal, meaningful, social/artifactual levels are dependent on the impersonal and meaningless (all the interior life is dependent on something that isn't interior). In fact, the meaningful levels seem to often times be reactions of revulsion or disgust at the meaningless - terror management theory is a great elaboration of this. The meaningful also often seems to be essentially illusory. Furthermore, it seems (at least to me) to threaten the legitimacy of the meaningful by describing it in terms of the impersonal. It is not the "meaningful", it is the "social". "Social" - a dry, general, scientific term that describes something that it (the term "social"), is not. "Social" is not social, if that makes sense.

So it's not that the meaningful doesn't exist, it's that it's effectively impotent in the grand scheme of things.

(all the interior life is dependent on something that isn't interior) ... The meaningful also often seems to be essentially illusory. — darthbarracuda

But that is taking the position that to be meaningful, it would have to come from within in some strong sense. And naturalism would instead see the individual as a plastic state of adaptedness. Being is always contextual. And so meaningfulness is what emerges as a functional or adapted relation between a "self" and a "world".

Meaning is always going to be exterior to the self as the self is what is contextually being constructed by a functional relationship. From that, adaptedness can be presumed. And merely coping or living in some kind of denial - as in terror management theory - would be the pathological state, not the philosophical baseline.

No one. It's not like your idea is different from their idea. You guys are looking at different angles of the same elephant. — Caldwell

I cant find the other vantage point.

Somewhere in the world somebody is getting royally screwed right now (and not in a good way).
Why does it matter?

In the vast ocean of time and space (and whatever other dimensions there may be) who cares if two little dust bunnies are strangling each other?

We are animals evolving into gods. All part of God’s plan.

So it's not that the meaningful doesn't exist, it's that it's effectively impotent in the grand scheme of things. — darthbarracuda

Sounds like a recipe for angst?

But naturalism is also creatively open-ended. — apokrisis

I'm not following.

Sub-optimal existence and the problem of evil are transitory problems; they will go away as we evolve further. We are still a very immature society by evolutionary standards. Imagine what we will be like in a million or billion years time.

So God is playing the long game. Unfortunately for us we are at a very early stage of evolution so we are experiencing ‘can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs’.

So God is playing the long game. Unfortunately for us we are at a very early stage of evolution so we are experiencing ‘can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs’. — Devans99

I'm experiencing that my care-refrigerator is empty. My give-a-damn-camera has no film.

I have a metric ton of oh-that's-too-bad.

Exactly we are the broken eggs that make the omelette of utopia

That would make a good tattoo.