[Svettie]

Maybe I'm not a serious person, but I don't think "consciousness means the popularly-understood ability to reason and plan" is part of the common understanding of this term, and a lot of what you wrote seems like a "no true Scottsman" to me. And actually, really defining well what is meant by "consciousness" seems to be a big part of the challenge.

> We're trying to really solve the hard problem here

This seems to me to be the crux of the misunderstanding. To me, panpsychism essentially presents a perspective that it may not be a well-defined problem in the first place. Like a dog chasing its own tail. Or if you prefer, it's like the question: "why is there something rather than nothing?" who knows if there is an answer to this? I don't want to go into this too much, but to me panpsychism is basically an intuition for why the "problem of consciousness" may belong to this set of fundamental questions that we may not be able to find an answer for, and if that could conceivably be the case, then it is valuable for providing that intuition because that may be the best we can do.