But why would this be our answer, when a simpler explanation is simply that some of the "artifacts" of memory are peripheral to the brain itself?

For instance, if an engineer dies before completing a groundbreaking invention, but they left behind ample notes about their plans, other engineers might be able to pick up where they left off, and finish building the invention after the original engineer died.

But we need not presume that the dead engineer's notes possessed any of the engineer's actual "sentience". We just need to presume that the other engineers were able to interpret the dead engineer's notes.

The real reason to believe panpsychism is just because the hard problem of consciousness from a materialist perspective is eternally onsolvable from an "a priori" perspective, whereas the combination problem is simply a question we don't know the answer to yet.

As soon as we assume the theory of evolution to be true, we must also assume that the building blocks of the universe are not predefined species, but rather, must be something smaller, which must themselves possess the capacity to create sentience.