No it wasn't. It was a perfectly wrong summary, unless you were thinking that I meant metaphysical solipsism (which nobody really talks about anyway), which would have been exceedingly weird given that I was criticizing what you said you could come to know so was obviously talking epistemology.
And far from dropping solipsism, I continued to talk about it and you apparently didn't even notice!
I scarcely see what good faith you're offering if this mistaken braggadocio is supposed to be it.
Since you seem not to be picking up the obvious inferences, I'll spell it out here: the point of facing solipsism is to force oneself to deal with doubt.
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"If this is a roundabout inquiry into Panpsychism"
It's a reply to your claim that you only assume experience and that there are other experiencers that can create experience for each other, demonstrating that at least among easily-experienced things, there seem to be experiencers and non-experiencers.
My goal is to establish that there seem to be material things, based on experience alone.
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"Awareness itself doesn't break at any point."
Except it apparently does, nightly. (Additional often-reversible episodes available courtesy of alcohol, blunt trauma, lack of oxygen, etc. etc..)
"And my response to that would start with the statement that the only thing anyone can definitively say is that one simply has no memories of the time they were asleep or were in a coma, not that there were no experiences at all."
And my response would start with the statement that the only thing you can definitively say the other way is that you sometimes have awareness. For all you know or can show, awareness breaks all the time, just the way it obviously seems.
"This is just one example (there are many others along w/ considerable scientific research) to show that a state of being asleep or even in a coma doesn't translate to a lack of experience, only a lack of memory."
Yes, let's see an example of scientific research, please. If you can cite the primary literature that would be best, because if someone claims to be measuring experience you want to know the methods in detail.
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"And if there were even one working theory to describe how you get experience from non-experiencing stuff, I'd be right on board with you. Give me a clear line of reasoning that doesn't amount to theoretical wishful thinking or conceptual fantasizing and I'll still take it a lot more seriously than I do right now."
Unfortunately, I haven't any idea about what you think a "clear line of reasoning" would even look like.
As far as I can tell, I would start with something like, "Okay, so suppose we have some matter..." and you'd go "NO! NO! No one would believe such a preposterous thing as that an experience could come from matter!". And then I might go, "Fine, then, consider a computation," and you'd go "Bah! No-one would give THAT an iota of serious consideration!"
That is, it doesn't matter what I say. You'll deliver strongly-worded objections devoid of any argument. You know full-well you're not going to get a fully worked-out theory with abundant supporting evidence or we wouldn't be having the argument in the first place; and past experience has indicated that anything less (heck, maybe even that much) will elicit only content-free derision.
It's not an olive branch; it's just more cactus that you're trying to trick me into thinking isn't entirely thorns. Maybe you've fooled yourself. But I've seen how this goes already.
So, let's turn this around. Why do you believe, given that things with experiences and things without--despite being made out of apparently the exactly same kind of stuff, just in drastically different configurations--cannot possibly be that way because of their structure? If you can't conceive of something, maybe the problem is with your powers of conception.
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"This can only work if you conflate the truth with what's necessary for survival. You make no actual argument about this, only preassuming that it is the case."
Oh good grief--the setup of Hoffman's models is that some values are better for survival than others! That's what we're talking about. Of course when critiquing someone's model you talk about their formulation!
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"Where is the actual redness coming from?"
Perhaps from neurons whose activity indicates the experience of redness, for example, feeding it and every other experience into another group of neurons whose role is to compute future actions. The first group wouldn't necessarily be the red vision signal itself, but rather an abstraction of the raw sensory signal appropriate for use by the "this is what we know right now" module that is talking to the "using what we know right now, what should we do or what can we conclude" module, which feeds back into the "know right now" module etc. recursively.
The actual redness, in a model like this, would come from the activation of the right neurons within this recurrent what-do-we-know/what-do-we-do loop.
Again, it doesn't have to work this way. But a system like this would seem have all the needed properties.