But this isn't an assumption. It's an extremely well-documented fact of psychology that there are many cases in which we don't seek truth reliably. For instance, all the in-group vs out-group results in psychology, or self-interested bias, etc. etc..

So, do our minds provide plenty of substrate for false memes to spread through? A quick look at Twitter or TikTok answers with a resounding: Yes!

Empiricism is extraordinarily important because the space of what-could-be is vastly larger than the space of what-is-a-good-description-of-what-is.

The empiricist flaw is very small--most of the supposed flaw actually lies in the lack of imagination and experimental sophistication of the asker, not in the method itself. For instance, "what is beauty" is a perfectly reasonable empirical question for cognitive neuroscience for humans, or neuroethology for other species. "Is there any God" is a tough question to address empirically (proving a negative can be done logically but not by inductive reasoning), but "is this evidence of this God" is eminently answerable, as is "can postulating God with these qualities help us understand any phenomena we observe or feel subjectively"?

What we must be content with, however, is a degree of uncertainty. Some of us are trained to take this in stride, and it's really no problem--the people confidently blundering about, many of whom are (probably) right, many of whom are (necessarily) wrong, and all of whom have misplaced confidence in that their way is the right way seem rather comical as opposed to weighing the different likelihoods and payoffs and consequences and so on.

The reality is that I'm not going to get a detailed answer to "what is beauty" from science any time soon, and the reality therefore is that anyone who needs a solid answer to that in order to act is fooling themselves.

There is an unfortunate tendency to drift from empiricism to rationalism, mostly out of habit, I think, because rational methods are exceedingly helpful in evaluating evidence, and one gets overly-used to it. That is, I suppose, a psychological flaw in the scientific method, but it's not really a basic flaw, but yet another aspect of human psychology (like becoming overly-fond of one's own hypotheses) that needs to be overcome through cultural factors (as lack of self-doubt is countered by a culture of strongly preferring results that have been peer-reviewed).

So I agree that language like "hallucination" for the ordinary operation of the brain is unhelpful, but not that this is particularly intimately tied to a problem with scientific empiricism. There are piles of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists who don't favor such terminology, for instance, and I think it's the more empirically-grounded ones who are less likely to use evocative and imprecise language like "hallucination".

Anyway, as a philosophical critique, I don't think your arguments are particularly on-target. And as a sociological critique, if anything it's backwards: most of the problem with science sociologically is that we pat ourselves on the back saying "science!" without actually doing it, not that we're failing to consider nonscientific perspectives.