you might be interested in emergentism and constructivism as I believe they provide useful concrete answers to your questions. Panpsychism falls into the slippe

you might be interested in emergentism and constructivism as I believe they provide useful concrete answers to your questions. Panpsychism falls into the slippery question of defining what "consciousness" is; emergentism provides the frameworks of cybernetics and systems theory to approach many philosophical issues, and can be applied in a panpsychism-ish way by using the concept of self-organisation and adaptation to the environment as the scale for "consciousness". constructivism says that our experience of reality is based in our perceptions and our labels for things are just useful mental models. An object is defined by how we use it - a chair is a thing you sit on, for example. The ship of theseus is whatever theseus uses to travel the river regardless of the planks it is made of. I've not yet run into any internal contradictions in this worldview, which is the stick by which I measure sensemaking model efficacy.