How many philosophies can handle premonition?

[LuckyR]

I understand, but as you know different folks use the word differently. Some use the word to give random events more importance than they deserve, others use it to attempt to lower the importance of connected issues.

Yup, you are right, @LuckyR , people do that.

And both of those actions are crimes of sophistry and rhetoric.

I agree with calling random events, random and calling related events, related. Though most users of the term "coincidence" feel they are communicating clearly.

[Papus79]

These attempts to give a physical explanation to metaphysical issues don't seem productive to me, no matter how sophisticated the attempts are made to sound.

Physics belongs within physics, and metaphysics belongs within metaphysics. And like East being east, and West being west, n'ary the twain should ever meet.

I'm sure you probably already know what I'll say to that but just to verify.

Definitions of the 'physical' and the 'natural' are pretty much anything we can verify as real at this point. Now you can have gulfs of observation, such as those who'd claim Everett interpretation of quantum physics won't be able to see other universes, that wouldn't make those universes metaphysical. Similarly you can have combinatorial explosion of complexity, that's chaos and it can be difficult if not - potentially - impossible to dig through, but claiming that consciousness and/or God aren't impossibly far of a real but uninterpretble chain does something more than say it's obscured by chaos - it seems to suggest a complete causal disjunct between consciousness and nature or God and nature and then what...? It would be two separate places completely sealed off from each other by lack of knowledge, void really, and couldn't have any knowledge of each other. That there's constant interaction of consciousness and matter shows that there's two-way knowledge and for anything to be able to have influence of that sort it has to have some type of leverage.

When I look at subjective experience or the ways in which consciousness seems to work I really don't think we have an intractable mystery on our hands. On one hand I've noticed correlations that seem to point in the right direction, in one sense it's a bit like causality in space time dividing by zero or something rotated 90 degrees toward the three dimensions, and on the other hand - and perhaps this is just a side-effect of it spilling through organic chemistry, it's a bit like mathematical monsters or Julia sets getting written. It seems like there's so much that we can say we know about subjectivity that it seems as though we should be able to map it from the inside out and see what type of platypus in nature has a bill, is furry, has barbs on its elbows, etc. in the same way as our subjective experience. For it to interact with nature it has to be embedded in nature and have observable effects (even if they in many cases don't display intention as we'd think of it as humans).

Even if it's something whose proper place of origin is in the geometries that are neither space nor time but the more primitive root it's still manifesting in certain ways that we should be able to track in the next twenty or thirty years and see if our AI has it when it can pass Turing tests, to see what things in nature may have been far more conscious than we ever thought and we may need to adjust our ethical relationships to those things accordingly. There seems to be no reason to believe that something that has a fingerprint in this world would have no objective signature of its own.


Similarly with the question of God - I'd start with my own experience, that in mystical states I've seen my own consciousness as something like a small living white star, same with other people, and there'a an NDE'er in particular who seemed to nail my sense of it - Peter B Todd from Australia - who talked about seeing this very bright light dragging all of creation like a see of smaller lights or jewels in a mathematical sequence, almost like a vast beautiful stellar jellyfish of man of war and quite reminiscent of what people talk about when they mention Indra and his net (which Michael Silberstein has often narrowed down to the metaphysic of ontological structural realism - ie. open system).


A quick and important note on the morality of theology and people, I'm really of the mindset that all of the major world religions are woven from precursor pagan religions and shamanistic/animistic ones previous to that. My big round of that was with my reading of the bible, seeing a lot of what I'd later come to understand as astrotheology and neoplatonism jumping out at me, and there were a few authors who were able to expand on that well. Similarly I find it fascinating in equal proportions to listen to people high up in Crowley's orders like OTO and A.'.A.'., or even groups like Temple of Ascending Flame, talk about their work and as far as I can tell it's all interaction with the same forces. To some degree those orders who handle more Qliphotic or chthonic beings are dealing with very earthy, evolutionary, red-in-tooth-and-nail 'root chakra' type of internal alchemy, ie. they're interfacing with the power of their own genes and bringing the power of their own animal into willing and synergistic abeyance to their higher principles - Jung called this 'shadow work' and it's gotten to be a popular terminology for that side of self-transformation. Similarly Christians talk to angels, Jews talk to angels, Muslims talk to angels, ceremonial magicians talk to angels, Thelemites and Crowleyans talk to angels, and they seem to come away with a very similar take and orientation - ie. that the point of working with them is to take ownership of the charge we were given here, it. to make the world and ourselves in whatever ways we can, and that trying to do harmful stuff isn't just boring but it's counterproductive and that the angels tend to ignore or distance themselves from people not on their theology but if they're trying to do something very material and 'for them'. Similarly the apparitions of various figures are tricky, and I've found few more complex than that of Jesus - ie. you take the various mystics alive today who'd claim to have commerce with him and they walk away with very different conclusions, and quite a few of them are rather new age and open in their theology (Akiane Krameric comes to mind).

A lot of this suggests that we're dealing with 'something' but that something is much more homogenous, and listening to Frater Ashen Chassan on Glitch Bottle was quite enlightening recently - he mentioned that one of the things the entities said is that they're all of the same fabric, that it's not a mystery they can explain to humanity at this time very well but that it's something that has to be sort of taken at face value until that point (and there's a really fascinating reference to that in the Martinist universal table which shows much of their model of creation surrounded by a sphere of faces).

I think that's where I have the impression that we can make headway on this, not just by philosophic postulation and scientific tests of brains and neurons but also figuring out which outside observers - whether archangels, Olympic spirits, etc. that we can go back to, build working relationships with, and see what can be done with our knowing aid of their causes in straightening out some of our current problems - like finding another economic system that doesn't have to throw all of nature in the engine to keep us from having to go to war to reset our debts or establishing a societal structure that incentivizes things that will keep us alive, sort of like Bret Weinstein's game B or the types of game theory informed structures that David Sloan Wilson would like to see in place rather than a system that seems to be increasingly etched and built by survival of the most narcissistic and narrow only. If this world continues or even accelerates at being a place where one has to completely throw out any personality , interests, or humanity in hopes of running with the fastest and surviving to be able to pay their bills - we're almost assured either extinction or some tribal remnant population who'll have to reboot us over possibly tens of thousands of years from scratch, likely complete with all the horrors that the ancient world, dark ages, and middle ages had to offer along the way.

[NickGaspar]

Premonition(Intuition) is a good way to be wrong! At least this is what the work of the Nobelist Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has shown. In his book "Think fast and slow" he presents a huge number of experiments about our heuristics and how they fail to serve us even when we are consider to be "experts" on a subject.
Premonition is not a valid "tool" for Philosophy if we care about our conclusions.

Now how religious claims on undetectable entities (gods and angels) are relevant to a philosophical discussion?
All concepts about entities need to be proven first before we even assume the implications they might have in our lives. Speculations on presumptions are not what Philosophy is all about!!!

[Papus79]

Premonition(Intuition) is a good way to be wrong! At least this is what the work of the Nobelist Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has shown. In his book "Think fast and slow" he presents a huge number of experiments about our heuristics and how they fail to serve us even when we are consider to be "experts" on a subject.
Premonition is not a valid "tool" for Philosophy if we care about our conclusions.

If I remember correctly I heard Sam Harris's entire interview with Dan, it was quite interesting. The original question wasn't about whether intuitions necessarily always serve as accurate, I'd think of that as a different layer of cognitive circuitry that sometimes does things we can't and at other times runs too far on a half-baked idea and we end up getting ourselves in a mess for having followed it - and there's really not a lot to go on to tell the difference.

My OP was more about the idea that if you see enough of a statistical black swan to strongly suggest that there is some type of forward-reach, what the best theory of space-time, QM, and GR would be to handle that. Minkowsky was what I started with, someone else made a persuasive case for Everett but only in near-term events. One late change I'd make, and I think it could have served my OP better, people have very different degrees of what would qualify such a black swan based on whether it would break their current understanding and if someone may think of consciousness as broader but no set future it would take one degree, if they don't believe in a set future and additionally are 99.9999% certain that consciousness is made by neurons then that's maybe two or three degrees.

Now how religious claims on undetectable entities (gods and angels) are relevant to a philosophical discussion?
All concepts about entities need to be proven first before we even assume the implications they might have in our lives. Speculations on presumptions are not what Philosophy is all about!!!

Really just a big side-bar. h_k_s brought up angels almost right out of the gate. It probably didn't help make the conversation clearer for other participants and it wasn't intended as any sort of clarifier for the OP. If anything it seems like, just based on the sorts of bizarre political battles that go on around consciousness, it's a place of strange things - and I think Sam Harris's analogy for politics is a good one - where your beliefs on gun rights shouldn't tell me anything about your beliefs on global warming, there's zero proper correlation, but in the sort of environment we're in this is what tends to happen.

That said I don't know what the best way to deal with that is - ie. touch on a topic that's important to someone's eschatological views, find it getting woven in as part-in-parcel, is there something like a folder here for side-bar conversations if you want to leave em public? I'm not averse to talking about 'unproven entities', I might have to agree that's a bit more like an exploration of potential occult biology (and I mean active exploration - not just debating the merits of whether or not they might exist, that's pointless), in a way I see various methods people have for reaching those sorts of entities as something like an attempt at a sort of empiricism aimed at the subjective (I have a lot of long-running reasons for putting it that way), and I'd agree that philosophy has more to do with analyzing and comparing systems of thought at deep levels more than it does these sorts of explorations.

I guess that just means we might be better off just getting the topic back on track and maybe generalizing my starting example more, ie. given a black swan experience that - to you (whoever is reading it) pries the likelihood of both future states already existing and even seeing them three or four months out, what system would best describe that particular situation in terms of QM and GR.

[Deall12]

Ambiguous testing and quality assurance team communicate with clients in real time and provide them the testing documentation on daily basis to let them know what is done so far and what has to be done to fix all the issues related to their product.

[h_k_s]

These attempts to give a physical explanation to metaphysical issues don't seem productive to me, no matter how sophisticated the attempts are made to sound.

Physics belongs within physics, and metaphysics belongs within metaphysics. And like East being east, and West being west, n'ary the twain should ever meet.

I'm sure you probably already know what I'll say to that but just to verify.

Definitions of the 'physical' and the 'natural' are pretty much anything we can verify as real at this point. Now you can have gulfs of observation, such as those who'd claim Everett interpretation of quantum physics won't be able to see other universes, that wouldn't make those universes metaphysical. Similarly you can have combinatorial explosion of complexity, that's chaos and it can be difficult if not - potentially - impossible to dig through, but claiming that consciousness and/or God aren't impossibly far of a real but uninterpretble chain does something more than say it's obscured by chaos - it seems to suggest a complete causal disjunct between consciousness and nature or God and nature and then what...? It would be two separate places completely sealed off from each other by lack of knowledge, void really, and couldn't have any knowledge of each other. That there's constant interaction of consciousness and matter shows that there's two-way knowledge and for anything to be able to have influence of that sort it has to have some type of leverage.

When I look at subjective experience or the ways in which consciousness seems to work I really don't think we have an intractable mystery on our hands. On one hand I've noticed correlations that seem to point in the right direction, in one sense it's a bit like causality in space time dividing by zero or something rotated 90 degrees toward the three dimensions, and on the other hand - and perhaps this is just a side-effect of it spilling through organic chemistry, it's a bit like mathematical monsters or Julia sets getting written. It seems like there's so much that we can say we know about subjectivity that it seems as though we should be able to map it from the inside out and see what type of platypus in nature has a bill, is furry, has barbs on its elbows, etc. in the same way as our subjective experience. For it to interact with nature it has to be embedded in nature and have observable effects (even if they in many cases don't display intention as we'd think of it as humans).

Even if it's something whose proper place of origin is in the geometries that are neither space nor time but the more primitive root it's still manifesting in certain ways that we should be able to track in the next twenty or thirty years and see if our AI has it when it can pass Turing tests, to see what things in nature may have been far more conscious than we ever thought and we may need to adjust our ethical relationships to those things accordingly. There seems to be no reason to believe that something that has a fingerprint in this world would have no objective signature of its own.


Similarly with the question of God - I'd start with my own experience, that in mystical states I've seen my own consciousness as something like a small living white star, same with other people, and there'a an NDE'er in particular who seemed to nail my sense of it - Peter B Todd from Australia - who talked about seeing this very bright light dragging all of creation like a see of smaller lights or jewels in a mathematical sequence, almost like a vast beautiful stellar jellyfish of man of war and quite reminiscent of what people talk about when they mention Indra and his net (which Michael Silberstein has often narrowed down to the metaphysic of ontological structural realism - ie. open system).


A quick and important note on the morality of theology and people, I'm really of the mindset that all of the major world religions are woven from precursor pagan religions and shamanistic/animistic ones previous to that. My big round of that was with my reading of the bible, seeing a lot of what I'd later come to understand as astrotheology and neoplatonism jumping out at me, and there were a few authors who were able to expand on that well. Similarly I find it fascinating in equal proportions to listen to people high up in Crowley's orders like OTO and A.'.A.'., or even groups like Temple of Ascending Flame, talk about their work and as far as I can tell it's all interaction with the same forces. To some degree those orders who handle more Qliphotic or chthonic beings are dealing with very earthy, evolutionary, red-in-tooth-and-nail 'root chakra' type of internal alchemy, ie. they're interfacing with the power of their own genes and bringing the power of their own animal into willing and synergistic abeyance to their higher principles - Jung called this 'shadow work' and it's gotten to be a popular terminology for that side of self-transformation. Similarly Christians talk to angels, Jews talk to angels, Muslims talk to angels, ceremonial magicians talk to angels, Thelemites and Crowleyans talk to angels, and they seem to come away with a very similar take and orientation - ie. that the point of working with them is to take ownership of the charge we were given here, it. to make the world and ourselves in whatever ways we can, and that trying to do harmful stuff isn't just boring but it's counterproductive and that the angels tend to ignore or distance themselves from people not on their theology but if they're trying to do something very material and 'for them'. Similarly the apparitions of various figures are tricky, and I've found few more complex than that of Jesus - ie. you take the various mystics alive today who'd claim to have commerce with him and they walk away with very different conclusions, and quite a few of them are rather new age and open in their theology (Akiane Krameric comes to mind).

A lot of this suggests that we're dealing with 'something' but that something is much more homogenous, and listening to Frater Ashen Chassan on Glitch Bottle was quite enlightening recently - he mentioned that one of the things the entities said is that they're all of the same fabric, that it's not a mystery they can explain to humanity at this time very well but that it's something that has to be sort of taken at face value until that point (and there's a really fascinating reference to that in the Martinist universal table which shows much of their model of creation surrounded by a sphere of faces).

I think that's where I have the impression that we can make headway on this, not just by philosophic postulation and scientific tests of brains and neurons but also figuring out which outside observers - whether archangels, Olympic spirits, etc. that we can go back to, build working relationships with, and see what can be done with our knowing aid of their causes in straightening out some of our current problems - like finding another economic system that doesn't have to throw all of nature in the engine to keep us from having to go to war to reset our debts or establishing a societal structure that incentivizes things that will keep us alive, sort of like Bret Weinstein's game B or the types of game theory informed structures that David Sloan Wilson would like to see in place rather than a system that seems to be increasingly etched and built by survival of the most narcissistic and narrow only. If this world continues or even accelerates at being a place where one has to completely throw out any personality , interests, or humanity in hopes of running with the fastest and surviving to be able to pay their bills - we're almost assured either extinction or some tribal remnant population who'll have to reboot us over possibly tens of thousands of years from scratch, likely complete with all the horrors that the ancient world, dark ages, and middle ages had to offer along the way.

Your own formulation Papus79 clearly is becoming very sophisticated. That is a phase. I went through the same phase.

I'm not sure what your main objective is by doing so, but mine was to come to a complete understanding of Deity through the Hebrew and Christian bibles. I even tried to live all the 1,000 rules for a while too. Since then I have also given attention to Buddhism as well, since it contains some additional good ideas missing from Christianity, since Jesus did not give any specific guidance on poisons, arms dealing, or slavery, whereas St. Paul does condone slavery, which is an abomination to me.

But ultimately I concluded a Deistic reality, in which God(s) has/have placed us here, and now we are on our own. That thought may be frightening to most, however I can deal with it. I can accept that I walk through the valley of the shadow of death alone, with only the rules of God(s) in my mind to comfort me.

My rules have devolved from the 1,000 in the Bible to a handful therefore, since we are alone now, and since the only thing that matters is what I believe is now necessary to keep me alive and to please the God(s) in general. I no longer believe in any very specific detailed rules.

My rules are:

1 - don't kill any person if it is in any way avoidable (duty to retreat).

2 - don't kill any person unless defending your own life depends on it (self defense) or your loved ones', or a stranger has petitioned you to help them.

3 - don't hurt anyone or anything if you can avoid it.

4 - don't kill animals unless you plan to eat their meat, and don't waste it.

5 - a military career is ok if desired, but avoid any killing during an unjust war (Viet Nam, Iraq, etc.).

6 - help others as much as you can without hurting yourself too much.

7 - participate in democracy but don't overdo it with a lot of involvement.

8 - as Hesiod said, show moderation in all things.

9 - live within your own financial means and save a goodly portion of your earnings for hard times later.

10 - be kind to all animals including insects because they all have a purpose on this Earth.

11 - do not lie, cheat, steal, rob, assault, murder, enslave, or otherwise harm others.

12 - participate in civic affairs such as environment cleanup, jury duty, reporting crimes in progress, etc.

13 - read your own favorite religious literature (for me it is the Greek New Testament in Greek with subtitles in English) weekly.

14 - pray to your God(s) weekly giving thanks for your life and benefits received, and having a ceremonial wafer and juice meal in communion with them at that time.

15 - be vigilant and protect yourself and your goods and others as well as their goods day and night.

16 - be prepared to serve as a militiaman armed and equipped in case a foreign enemy invades your country (for the USA this could include Mexico, Russia, or China; I don't think any others would dare invade us). When the USA invaded Canada back in 1812, the British in return invaded the USA. So it has happened. And in 1941 when Japan attacked Hawaii, they could have followed up with a West Coast invasion of the USA as well, and they should have strategically, but they did not. So it could happen again.

17 - choose a profession beneficial to society and the world in general. I help people (for a fee) with their taxes during the daytime, and I moonlight by guarding sites at night as armed security. These fall outside of the Buddhist proscription on forbidden professions such as poison manufacturing, arms dealing, alcohol manufacturing and distribution, meat slaughtering and butchering, or slavery.

18 - choose a healthy lean diet of vegetables, minimal meat, and nominal carbs as necessary for your activity level.

19 - exercise your body physically as often as you can with lots of walking and other exercises.

20 - speak only the truth, or say nothing at all.

Those are my own rules. They come from my own metaphysics. But they manifest themselves as ethics guidelines to me specifically. So in my own case, metaphysics is the foundation for my own ethics.

[h_k_s]

Yup, you are right, @LuckyR , people do that.

And both of those actions are crimes of sophistry and rhetoric.

I agree with calling random events, random and calling related events, related. Though most users of the term "coincidence" feel they are communicating clearly.

Word usage and vocabulary are big stumbling blocks in Philosophy and as such always problematic.

[Papus79]

But ultimately I concluded a Deistic reality, in which God(s) has/have placed us here, and now we are on our own. That thought may be frightening to most, however I can deal with it. I can accept that I walk through the valley of the shadow of death alone, with only the rules of God(s) in my mind to comfort me.

I'd say the rules of my own cultivated ethics, reason, knowledge of what's right - even if I know that I'm living a life destined for childlessness, singlehood, and likely needing to give every last drop of blood to my job so as not to stay off the street - and when things really go Hunger Games in the workplace and everyone whose not a pefect genetic conformist or a toady to the local petty tyrant I'm not sure even all that will matter, I have a neurological disability and going up against all-in narcissists and sociopaths I'm likely to get ruined and ultimately end up homeless or dead regardless. My best guess in the next ten or twenty years - life is going to be increasingly very, very cheap and I feel awful when I see kids under 10 and what I'm pretty sure they're going to be coming to adulthood in.

This goes back to my interpretation that if there's a Godhead it both a) loves us unconditionally and b) will let absolutely anything happen to us while we're here, which in a lot of ways is ice-cold comfort.

[h_k_s]

But ultimately I concluded a Deistic reality, in which God(s) has/have placed us here, and now we are on our own. That thought may be frightening to most, however I can deal with it. I can accept that I walk through the valley of the shadow of death alone, with only the rules of God(s) in my mind to comfort me.

I'd say the rules of my own cultivated ethics, reason, knowledge of what's right - even if I know that I'm living a life destined for childlessness, singlehood, and likely needing to give every last drop of blood to my job so as not to stay off the street - and when things really go Hunger Games in the workplace and everyone whose not a pefect genetic conformist or a toady to the local petty tyrant I'm not sure even all that will matter, I have a neurological disability and going up against all-in narcissists and sociopaths I'm likely to get ruined and ultimately end up homeless or dead regardless. My best guess in the next ten or twenty years - life is going to be increasingly very, very cheap and I feel awful when I see kids under 10 and what I'm pretty sure they're going to be coming to adulthood in.

This goes back to my interpretation that if there's a Godhead it both a) loves us unconditionally and b) will let absolutely anything happen to us while we're here, which in a lot of ways is ice-cold comfort.

It is what it is.

Life for us today is still a lot easier than in ancient times, when there were professional marauding armies, slavery, widespread murder, etc.

If you are going to become homeless, best thing is to prepare for it:

1 - have a roomy comfortable used car like a VW wagon or SUV you can sleep in.

2 - get a small space heater (called a milk room heater) and long heavy duty extension cord for winters (there are lots of plug-in sockets at malls you can use).

3 - get a fitness center membership for showers and cleanup.

4 - get direct deposit for your job or social security payments.

5 - there are lots of people who are homeless but also have jobs, so that's why you need direct deposit.

6 - us a relative or friend's address as a perm residence address.

7 - pay your cellphone bill at the retail store like AT+T etc.

8 - get some camping gear for summers outside and use a KOA during those months occasionally.

9 - get a pistol, shoulder holster, and CFP while you can.

10 - get 2 rechargeable flashlights and the plug-in recharger for them for your car.

11 - get a storage rental unit and set it up like an office with a desk and chair and all your items that you don't want to get rid of, such as bicycle, boxes, etc. (make sure it has an electrical outlet inside it to plug-in a lamp and your computer/phone).

There are lots of things you can do now to prepare for the inevitable rather than just lament.

You have to play the hand you were dealt. No choice.

[Papus79]

Interesting bullet points and they make sense. I don't know if I will ultimately end up on the out or what the reality will be if I do (ie. whether it'll be a small portion of the population or something closing in on a majority - very different dynamics), it's not likely to be a major risk for maybe another ten or fifteen years but I do see the likelihood my life getting sucked in a funnel and from the sense I get from other people spending my thirties feeling like I was hopping from melting iceberg to melting iceberg to stay afloat is much more the new normal for a lot of people than something unique to me.

The main thrust of what i was getting at though - I think a lot of us are looking at our future with a fair amount of trepidation and it seems to take a rather special kind of sheltered living for someone to be a believing Santa-Christian or a true believer in The Secret. At best, if we can reach out to anything, it'll be for guidance on how to adjust our attitudes more than anything to keep from falling into the notion that going full-mercenary is a choice that won't have significant knock-on consequences (if I think reductive materialism as a whole ontology has done damage in one particular area it's that). For example, as someone with relative certainty that this is not the end I have to plan for what'll be like to leave, who I'd prefer to be or not to be by that point, and take serious consideration that most forms of self-inflicted damage, especially when it comes to personal integrity and integration, are potentially things I'd spend sweating off for hundreds if not thousands of years and at worst they may knock me off on an inferior trajectory if I let enough of that accrue.

[Kate]

It is very unlikely that a philosopher who holds a materialist position could adequately handle premonition.

[Papus79]

It is very unlikely that a philosopher who holds a materialist position could adequately handle premonition.

Physicalist maybe, but specifically materialist probably not.

[NickGaspar]

It is very unlikely that a philosopher who holds a materialist position could adequately handle premonition.

Well the problem with premonition relies on the overwhelming statistics we have against it and the fact that we don't have a way to evaluate unfalsifiable claims based on premonition.
Conclusions based on premonition do not serve the main purpose of Philosophy which is the production of knowledge and wise claims about the world.

[NickGaspar]

It is very unlikely that a philosopher who holds a materialist position could adequately handle premonition.

Physicalist maybe, but specifically materialist probably not.

Physicalism or materialism are biased philosophical views, but the problem with premonition is not limited to those two positions, but with a far more important one...that of Methodological Naturalism and with logic of course.

[Papus79]

Physicalist maybe, but specifically materialist probably not.

Physicalism or materialism are biased philosophical views, but the problem with premonition is not limited to those two positions, but with a far more important one...that of Methodological Naturalism and with logic of course.

I think what you said to Kate actually makes more sense than this in that it only unpacks coherently if we take for granted that there's overwhelming evidence against it and that it's some sort of purely faith-based economy.

The problems in this area are a bit different, and it's a lot of the same sociological and political strangeness that you have around the research of NDE's. Normally when you have real science facing down cranks, like with intelligent design promoters, the asymmetry of quality is painfully obvious. Here it seems like you have divided camps where neither seem to stand out as what you'd typically think of as cranks and you similarly notice an incapacity of commerce or reconciling differences of results. That seems like it's a cultural and political lacuna really preventing this from getting resolved, and with closed cases of that nature the number of professionals chasing after alternative hypotheses dwindles to nothing rather than inexplicably growing.