That's pretty interesting, do you have any references for it?
Nothing specific. What I wrote is my own synoptic view of a wide range of ancient thought about the elemental composition of reality, much of which I learned from secondary sources though it's pretty basic material. (And none of it from primary original sources as I don't read Greek, Latin, Hindi, etc.) The Greeks, for instance, disagreed vehemently with one another. Some championed various elemental monisms in which all substances are actually disguised forms of [your favorite here]. Others, that elements could transform into one another (which would imply they're all variant forms of some primal-stuff, but without actually saying so). Many, that all actual substances contained all the elements at least in trace amounts. I don't remember which it was that first associated elements with compass directions, but that association lives on in occult traditions. I believe there are also elemental associations in the astrology of the time. Aristotle included an entire sphere of fire as part of the sublunar cosmos.
All these ideas fit the general pattern of elements being ambient, as an explanation of how fire can appear in air, minerals condense from drying water, and so forth. Fire was not only one of the four tangible substances, it was also (to many of the Greeks) the principle of change and transformation. One might say, the causer of processes, though the idea that it itself was a process was never quite reached as far as I know. In spite of that, though, fire also stubbornly remained material. For instance many Greeks speculated that fire must be based on a triangular or tetrahedral form, the sharp points being the reason why it hurts to touch it! (Note that though that's completely wrong as an explanation of the sensation of heat from combustion, it's very close to completely correct as an explanation of the sensation of "heat" from spicy foods!)
Another common thread is that all these ancient Greek models of matter were very naturalistic. They all attempt in various ways to avoid explanations where things appear out of nowhere or phenomena rely on the actions of invisible spirits. You can contrast this with some medieval views, where fire gets conjured up from some distant realm of fire when kindled, and banished back to there when extinguished. There's a close parallel there with baron's insistence (completely justified, in my humble opinion) that his hypothesis is naturalistic and neither assumes nor implies a soul that persists after death.
Greek philosophy -- ambient or latent fire = baron's proto-conscousness field (no soul)
Medieval philosophy -- realm of fire = persistent conscious souls (and a remote realm of souls, e.g. heaven)
I think that we generally do tend to be confused by the nature of processes as opposed to things, and so to the extent that consciousness is a process it makes sense that it's been difficult for humans to understand.
We also tend to mischaracterize processes as things; or if there's actually no hard distinction between the two, we under-appreciate the process aspect of the nature of things. I've written before about how we think of a tree as an object made of (mostly) cellulose. Even when we try to look at it as a process, we focus mostly on the complex biochemistry that creates and arranges the cellulose during the tree's life cycle. But if you look at a tree on a greatly stretched time scale that gives the tree's life span the approximate duration of a lightning bolt's, what you see is that the tree is above all else a current, a channeled movement of a vast amount of water. A tree is a ground-to-air lightning bolt of water. The mass of all the cellulose is trivial compared to the amount of water that flows through it. We call the tree a thing and a lightning bolt as an action or event only because of our own biased perceptions of time scale.
On the other hand the fact that there's something that seems analogous that the ancients were wrong about doesn't show that we actually are analogously wrong about consciousness.
Correct, it's not proof or even direct evidence of that. What it does show, I think, is that if you make over-simplistic assumptions (e.g. that things that appear to exist must be material substances) you can end up with less robust models. There's nothing terribly wrong with thinking of fire as a material substance made of pointy triangles; it'll still cook your soup. But you do miss out on the useful symmetries that a more complete model reveals, such as the properties of energy and heat.
