[ifsothen]

Exploring ideas like panpsychism doesn't mean you're committing to them being true. We can't know everything, and we can't always link new ideas deductively to things we are certain about, but we can notice the inadequacy of current explanations, say "suppose this explanation is true" and proceed from there. Every good philosopher knows that they're doing that. And the fact that people defend their position and attack opposing views is just part of the adversarial process for testing ideas. Yeah, of course ego and pride and hubris happen to many philosophers, and the academic profession is frankly in a bad state, but that doesn't mean the fundamental approach is bad.

[mannykannot]

That is a fair point in general, but in the specific case of panpsychism, at least one of its most active proponents (Goff) combines an insistance that it is the most plausible explanation of the mind with an apparent lack of interest in saying anything empirically verifiable about what it actually means.

Whether in physics or metaphysics, one can only go so far without facts. Even the mundane world of that which actually is has repeatedly turned out to be stranger than was imagined possible.