I know there is hostility. It's all over science, just like every human endeavor. I've seen some good hostility from IDers against their critics, too. I haven't seen much hostility against NDE researchers, but perhaps it's there.
I think you are oversimplifying the situation. There are plenty of scientists working on the problem of consciousness. I read papers on the subject monthly. It is a difficult problem. If some renegade scientist comes along with a nonmaterialist framework that covers all our observations about consciousness without requiring us to toss out half of physics, people will pay attention. For example, if panpsychism is true, we should see some new physics that describes whatever new fundamentals are proposed.
~~ Paul
NDEs get completely dismiss on the doorstep. Most patients reporting NDEs get ignore by nurses. When the subject comes up in scientific discussions and debates, people use derogatory remarks and insult the NDE researchers are attention/money seeking charlatans, are they not aware talking a non materialist view is career suicide? What about the skeptics/science writers who never did any original research, and ride the mainstream's **** for their career and fame? I've seen this first hand many times.
Yes there are people working on consciousness, I don't keep up with the subject but I think most people are going in the direction of consciousness=computational complexity? I haven't seen many derogatory comments from professional researchers, but they still dismiss non materialist approaches without even looking at the evidence. And Koch frauds being a reductive materialist when his approach assumes consciousness is a new fundamental substance, it does show the amount of pressure the materialists themselves feel. And why do you think non materialism contradicts half of physics? The only thing it seems to violate is conservation of energy, or even just entropy. And there are materialist explanations for things like telepathy, Michael Persinger believes the brain can emit and receive photons like radios. Sean Carroll always remark about how telepathy is impossible because the brain needs to receive photons, how does he know it can't? And if you take an idealist view like Bernardo Kastrup, you don't even have to violate anything (since everything happens backstage and the material world is just what things look like). To me it's the dogmatic line of thinking in the mainstream, some of them even regard consciousness itself as "ill defined" and a better definition will do away the hard problem (Dennett, eliminative materialism etc), this feels to me like they are even calling consciousness itself woo woo pseudoscience. Like somebody else said, anything that can't be put into a petri dish is regarded as pseudoscience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Pigliucci
While Pigliucci is an atheist himself,[20] he does not believe that science necessarily demands atheism because of two distinctions: the distinction between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism, and the distinction between value judgements and matters of fact. He believes that many scientists and science educators fail to appreciate these differences.[9] Pigliucci has criticized New Atheist writers for embracing what he considers to be scientism (although he largely excludes philosopher Daniel Dennett from this charge).
If you want answers to moral questions then you don't ask the neurobiologist, you don't ask the evolutionary biologist, you ask the philosopher."[22]
This guy knows what he's talking about, the difference between methodological materialism vs metaphysical materialism. This guy knows exactly how science should proceed. But then you get people like this https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/143917122X
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