My point is that the very statements you are making, that we are all making all the time, are also very theory-loaded, "not followed up with empirical studies". This includes the statements about the need to follow things up with empirical studies. You can't escape the need for experimentally unverified theoretical judgement, and it does seem to work, even though I can't give you a well-designed experimental verification of that. Some well-designed studies even prove that ghosts exist.

The degree to which discussion of familiar topics is closer to observations than discussion of more theoretical topics is unclear, and the distinction should be cashed out as uncertainty on a case-by-case basis. Some very theoretical things are crystal clear math, more certain than the measurement of the charge of an electron.

That is dangerous.

Being wrong is dangerous. Not taking theoretical arguments into account can result in error. This statement probably wouldn't be much affected by further experimental verification. What specifically should be concluded depends on the problem, not on a vague outside measure of the problem like the degree to which it's removed from empirical study.

[...] anything you yourself don't have available experimental evidence for or against, I can sway you in either way. E.g. that consciousness is in information being computed and not the computational process itself.

Before considering the truth of a statement, we should first establish its meaning, which describes the conditions for judging its truth. For a vague idea, there are many alternative formulations of its meaning, and it may be unclear which one is interesting, but that's separate from the issue of thinking about any specific formulation clearly.