I explained exactly what I meant by them being the same. And that point is that "redness" has no special quality. It's just neural reaction to photons of a certain wavelength hitting the retina. "Color" is a concept that encompasses more than just the neural reaction. That doesn't mean that this reaction and the light itself are one and the same, but that they are encompassed by the concept of redness.
Here's the issue (at least as I see it). There is the world, and there's the model of the world that the brain creates. Under the viewpoint that consciousness is just the workings of the brain, our experience of colour
is that model. I think this viewpoint is entirely consistent, and it's the one that I hold, but it's still clear in this viewpoint that there is a difference between the model and the reality that it models. Even under this viewpoint it's fair to say that without brains there would be no such thing as the experience of redness, because that experience is defined as a particular state of the brain.
I don't think that last sentence is in dispute by either side here, or least I don't think that it should be.
Now, someone else might come in and say that that's fine, but there's nothing about the physical laws that tell us what the experience or redness should be like. As Robin has pointed out many times in the thread, we can't use our understanding of physics (or chemistry, etc.) to model the interactions of the brain in such a way as to
predict the experience of redness. Whereas we could take a model of a clock and from that predict that it would make a ticking sound.
The response to this is that it's such a complex system that we can't model it in enough detail to do so, but there's every reason to think that
if we could we would predict the emergence of an experience of redness.
However, the issue here is that it's hard to see how anything like can could come out of the model. What would it even mean for an experience of redness to emerge from the model? Certainly we could have a model from which brainstates that we already identify with an experience of redness will arise. But we have to already have done that identifying in order to get that connection between the physical system and the subjective experience.
The "consciousness field" idea is that the
potential for a complex system like a brain to have an experience emerge from it's particular state is already there in the basic fundamental building blocks. "Field" here is really meant to be analgous with charge, for instance, in that an electron (say) can have charge as an inherent property that doesn't need further explanation, it's just a fact of the matter that electrons have charge, and under this idea they would also have "proto consciousness". This proto-consciousness is clearly not the same as consciousness of complex systems like brains because what exactly would an electron be conscious
of? But those holding this view would see it as a necessity that the fundamental building blocks had this potential as a basic property.
You'll note that this is still a materialistic viewpoint, just one that posits some properties to matter beyond those we have strong confirmation of from physical theories (and the driving force here is philosophers not physicists). I think the idea is currently too vague to be particularly convincing, but I also don't think it's obvious rubbish.
While the solution to the hard problem may simply be that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from a particular type of information processing (and my personal view is that that
will turn out to be the solution), I think anyone who thinks it's not an actual problem is kidding themselves.
