I think you're confusing me and Yvain. I'll take that as a complement, though!

Oops, I think you may be right, I'm sorry and/or you're welcome. Heh.

Anyway, oddly enough, I understand the details of your argument, but I don't see the big picture that you're presenting. You reject the proposal that qualia are dualistic in nature, so we're definitely on the same page here. But then you ask,

Presumably, we will eventually find a reductionist answer to the hard problem of consciousness... the question is, how is it that there is a conscious experience induced by neurons firing in response to stimulation of the optic nerve?

I agree that this is a hard question (seeing as it hasn't been fully answered yet), but I don't see this question as categorically different from questions such as "how is our blood flow regulated ?" or "how does visual perception work in humans ?". Presumably, a sleepwalker's brain, or a robot's circuitry, or a zombie's... er... goo or whatever it is zombies have, would implement this functionality in different ways than normal human brains do; and we could tell whether the sleepwalker/robot/zombie implements this functionality or not by talking to them (as you have pointed out in your thought experiment).

So, would you agree that the question "how does consciousness work" is no different from "how does blood flow work" ? If not (as I suspect is the case), then what's the difference ?

By the way, when people talk about qualia, they usually claim that we all share the same ones. Thus, for example, when I see something that I experience as "red", and you see something else (or maybe even the same object) that you experience as "red", we are both using the same exact quale to experience that stuff with. There's pretty much nowhere to go from this premise other than toward dualism, which is why I'd originally assumed you were going toward that route. But now I think that you'd reject the premise just as I do -- is that correct ?