Are you really denying that there is a difference between blueness as a phenomenal quality and blueness understood as the reflective quality of an object? Even if you want to say that the experience of looking at the sky is “blue” experience do you actually hold that experience is blue in the same way that the sky is?
The appropriate use of the words has changed along with our ontology. In a mode of naive realism, in which appearances are not distinguished from their external causes, then the blueness of the sky is the blueness of the experience of the sky, because no distinction is being made between sky and experience of sky. However, once you get to the point of distinguishing between the experienced sky and the physical sky, then blueness in the original sense is only a property of the experienced sky, and the new “blueness” of reflective physics is only a property of the physical sky.
The problem now is that in the attempt to reduce experience to physics as well, the original sense of blueness is being banished entirely from discussion, solely in order to achieve the reduction. While it may be annoying to be lectured about how you’re evading the question, you say outright
there’s no such thing as blueness except as a way of distinguishing a certain kind of sight experience
which I take to be an explicit repudiation of the naive concept of blueness as applying to anything, physical sky or experienced sky. And you also said, two steps back,
This is all to deny the motivation of looking past neuron firings to find qualia
which suggests that you do understand this motivation, and are deliberately trying to route around it.
The appropriate use of the words has changed along with our ontology. In a mode of naive realism, in which appearances are not distinguished from their external causes, then the blueness of the sky is the blueness of the experience of the sky, because no distinction is being made between sky and experience of sky. However, once you get to the point of distinguishing between the experienced sky and the physical sky, then blueness in the original sense is only a property of the experienced sky, and the new “blueness” of reflective physics is only a property of the physical sky.
The problem now is that in the attempt to reduce experience to physics as well, the original sense of blueness is being banished entirely from discussion, solely in order to achieve the reduction. While it may be annoying to be lectured about how you’re evading the question, you say outright
which I take to be an explicit repudiation of the naive concept of blueness as applying to anything, physical sky or experienced sky. And you also said, two steps back,
which suggests that you do understand this motivation, and are deliberately trying to route around it.