I think this is not the usual definition of reducibility, especially if you include "and yet remain what it is" as you did above. But I certainly don't claim to be any expert. Seems to me, then, that a quale is reductible.
Okay, well then you seem to have substituted your own answer for your own question. If you are interested in my answer though, you already have it.
If I pass out and wake up at a later time, I can figure out and think about the fact that I was not conscious. How am I to explain this if we insist that I am always conscious?
That's what I mean. You "figure out and think abut it". In other words, you generate a construct of a "time period" when you were "unconscious." But that is not your lived-in experience. I can equally well say, and I think I do, that in terms of your lived-in experience, you were conscious continually, as I too have been throughout my life, despite rationalizations such as "wait a minute, a doctor operated on me there, "I" must have been unconscious..."
It's removable but not reducible only if you insist that every variation of a quale is a separate thing. So if I'm seeing red-1 and then suddenly something happens to my brain and the perception changes, I've removed red-1 and replaced it with red-2.
Again, I don't see substitution as being equatable with reducibility. My toothache can be substituted with a worse toothache,or with a worse pain altogether, such as acute appendicitis. Not seeing anything at all in that to persuade me that pain is reducible. But perhaps I am not understanding you.
Two things about this. First, our understanding of the visual system suggests that redness is created by many processes, some of which can be defective.
Redness cannot be "created" by an ascriptive "process" because it is yoked directly to "that which it is to be" meaning that its "description" is never going to be adequate or accurate from a 'third-person-perspective' ontology. I don't doubt that brain physics etc contributes massively to redness. However, here is the problem, there is actually no such thing anyway, as "third-person-brain physics." It's an abstraction that doesn't exist in nature (in my view of what the world is, anyway). A brain is a living, active theater of "that which it is to be in action". In any case, we are not talking about speculative processes that give rise to redness, assuming that they exist, but to the experience of redness itself. Not conflating the two goes a long way towards repairing discussions in which people misuse the term "reducible."
Second, if irreducibility is obtained by saying that red-1 and red-2 are two separate things, then I think I can obtain irreducibility for anything: chair-1 is irreducible, because if I remove the back then I have chair-2, a separate thing.
...and this is the problem with linguistic tricks rooted in ascriptive definitions of things. But whether I am in pain or not is not a linguistic trick, but a fact of primary experience. It is my primary experience that pain either is, or is not. Again, saying that "I can substitute pain-1 for pain-2" doesn't address this ontic primacy, imo, but is an argument trying to hide itself in verbal trickery. I don't have a problem with qualitiative ranges. Imo, toothache and appendicitis occupy a qualitative range, but "green-ness" is outside of that range, inside a different quality envelope altogether.
I think you simply asserted that being and consciousness are the same. But I'll take you at your word; no reason to argue this point further.
Rather, I think YOU just asserted that it wasn't, but weren't able to back up your case. I, on the other hand, reminded you that any third party ascriptions you imagine that you form for things are rooted first (and can only ever be rooted) in your prior fact of presence as a self-existing, self-realizing entity.