Are those who don't honor logic deceitful egomaniacs?

[Azarnac]

When the broad ideas in favor of a position of this kind are translated into more specific arguments, usually opponents will be able to validly point out that there are other possibilities or even that an error was made. It is probably the case that if it hasn't happened yet with a new -ism, it's just a short matter of time. These broad recognitions don't translate well into solid arguments that demolish the metaphysical opposition.

To put it simply, Kastrup and his colleagues have constructed an argument which is more parsimonious than their physicalist opponents, and at the same time, gives more plausible explanations for a greater amount of existing studies than the materialist camp can provide. This is the most you can expect from the application of human logic.

I'll spell out a bit more of my surrounding thoughts. While there may be progress separate from the culture of the majority, I still think that progress is smaller than that of science and technology (and the turn in many countries towards values of secular humanism to some extent).

By verified, I mean verified by shared and more universal criteria. I don't discount that individuals may be able to arrive at something others can't accept as verification, while it's good enough for that one person; I see that as a separate idea.

They are apples and oranges though. Scientific "progress" is inherent to science, and doesn't quite apply to other schools of thought. For example, since my academic background is in medical anthropology, I know that I can't apply test criteria from standard double blind studies from biomedicine to the study of Siddha Medicine in Southern India. It simply doesn't work, because of structural blindness(in fact, this faulty logic is used a lot to drive non-European medicines out of the world on the competitive medical marketplace). In addition to that, everything outside of European Science is not as "standardized" as European Science, so going out looking for it will be futile. It has slight application in finding frauds, but ultimately, it will make you blind to fine nuances that in the end, mean everything in understanding non-European philosophies and practices.

I'm not sure if "pre-conceptual" really makes that much sense as a way to put it. For example, Peter Naur basically described being rooted in non-conceptual awareness larger than words all the time, seemingly without being a mystic, and finding words and academic philosophy too mentally cramped. Some others who prefer a less verbal and more systems thinking oriented general way of thought describe similar.

On your suggestion, I've read his dictionary and he reminds me of my first professor in Religious Studies, who like Naur, had a hard-on for William James, specifically his Principles of Psychology and Varieties. What they have in common is that you can tell by their writing and by what they focus on that they are firmly rooted in abstract philosophy and when they speak of "non-conceptual awareness", their personal experience of it differs greatly from the people I would eventually meet during my field studies in China and Southern India. You have to be skeptical about their claims because it often comes down to nothing more than what I would call cardio-vascular relaxation. People who are engaged in academia have a constant monologue going on and are very focused on concepts. Been through the whole thing myself. So they often get wow'ed by the first few steps of relaxation they get from retreats or personal attempts at stillness. But the chasm is very wide, and people don't just fall into pure consciousness or sahaja samadhi accidentally or at retreats. Well, extremely rarely it seems, and the people that do are not from intellectual backgrounds. It just takes a s*** ton of work for most people, and is simply not compatible with the working life of modern people. They'll tell themselves that a seeming lack of internal monologue equals silence or pure consciousness, but they can only do so because they don't apply the rigorous standards from actual schools to their practice. Otherwise they'd notice that they can barely hold it for longer than a few minutes.

I have a large and loose range of thought concerning how science and mysticism are and can be related, but mainly, I think a synthesis must be moore loose, tentative, and personal than any standardized spiritual "system". If any rigid shell is created to contain it all, it will miss the essence, and become a container for things that only approximate the essence in appearance. And for example, Don Elkins seemed to work in a more open-ended way avoiding that problem. I think most persons both mystical and scientific who don't mess up solve the problem by never trying too hard to do so. The resulting solution may be only partial, but then completion is not really realistic given the scope, no more realistic than finding the Holy Grail in the latest academic paper.

What about the problem of only being able to look down from where you stand, and not up? How can we synthesize or combine schools of thought without having mastered either of them? I've never met anyone who is both a fantastic scientist and a fantastic mystic at the same time. You yourself are familiar with the absurd attempts by Gurdjieff/Ouspensky and LKJ/Cassiopaeans to come up with some kind of scientific mysticism. We now have the luxury of looking back at both of them and seeing them for what they are: fantastic claims, but upon closer inspection, just clever marketing to adapt to their customers of their era, which, as it is ruled by science/metaphysical materialism, requires them to make people believe that what they're doing is scientific and not whacky.
When your intellect dominates your personality, you can have the tendency to over-analyze and construct fantastic attempts to synthesize large amounts of "data" from all kinds of places, but it all crumbles down when one simply attempts to do exercises by just one of the schools one claims to understand. Sitting down and getting to 3 hours of real silence would require a lifetime of dedicated practice for most people. Same with a thorough academic understanding of one field. For all the valid criticism of academic hyperspecialization, one look at Naur's Antiphilosophical Dictionary, for example, shows you already why people tend to embarass themselves once they step outside of their area of expertise. Naur was a computer scientist, and an excellent one as I understand it, but he was not a philosopher or psychologist, and it shows. That's why I suggested to get good at one thing. The actual practical problems you'd encounter on the way would already give you enough work to last a lifetime, and you'd likely be able to resolve the type of inner conflicts that remain in one's mind if one hasn't commited to a path yet.

What's your take on what skeptics say about things like shoddy alternative history, drinking bleach as a miracle cure, worldwide satanic conspiracies in which secret machinations will automatically conquer every soul with a vaccinated body, and various much smaller health scares and promises with shoddy argumentation about very physical things?

Well, you know the answer to that, right?
Your ability to make sensible decisions comes down to your insight. The more you know, the less you'll fall for claims like those made by flat-earthers.
There's a certain limit though. While it's best to always experience others and their claims in person(quality cannot be transferred in text; standing in front of a truly silent practitioner in Tiruvannamalai was very different from all those talky-talky Buddhist priests and philosophy professors I had met before) we cannot be everywhere and thus have to often go by what we find in the literature.
For example, is it true that the Smithsonian Institution has systematically hidden evidence for advanced pre-historic civilizations in Northern America? Hard to say, right? So it's mostly speculation based on newspaper clippings.
But then there is also Klaus Dona, an Austrian Curator, who has systematically collected out of place artifacts and given public demonstrations and talks. You can find them on youtube(some are in English, and some are in German) and show that he's tried to consult as many scientists as he can to make sense of his collection. It's all physical, and there is a lot of weird stuff that is fascinating.
We all know that the whole "alt-archeology", new age and spiritual "marketplace" is filled with frauds. Always has been. But with enough discernment, you can find some gems, and in the case of Klaus Dona, for example, they're quite physical and make you think about history.
But when it comes to metaphysics, the recent revival of academic idealism is probably the best you can get in the form of rigid logic. Beyond this, it all comes down to your own practice, as logical arguments can only serve to convince you of the truth value of something, and only direct experience will truly convince your heart.