Seeing red

[Angrboda]

I can describe it in multiple ways...You appear to be asking me to make a commitment to an ontological stance depending on which form of description I choose...I can provide multiple descriptions without being obligated to solely choose one and only one.

If all anyone can offer are various ways of talking about the problem, then they aren't actually proposing anything at all, just metaphors and analogies.  This isn't an issue of description. Descriptions are passive take-aways. They do not have the causal power that you seem to think they have.

The question is at hand is reduction. It's about proscription. This is to say "what makes events play out as they do?" and "what makes things what they are?" Attempting to reduce causal power in either direction, towards purely the material or purely the immaterial, always leaves something out. If someone reduces "Hey, Jude" as sound waves that eventually fire neurons, he leaves out the cause of its meaning and affect. If he reduces "Hey, Jude" to just its meaning and affect he leaves out the cause of its actualization.

Reduction isn't proscriptive, it's descriptive.  It's finding a lower level description that is isomorphically analogous to the upper level description.  You're right, we're dealing with analogs here, that's what reduction is.  The theories themselves are what is proscriptive. I don't agree that a successful reduction [always] leaves something significant out; if it does then it's not a successful reduction.  

. . . reduction is a relation between theories, and one phenomenon is said to reduce to another in virtue of the reduction of the relevant theories. For example, the claim that light has been reduced to electromagnetic radiation means (a) that the theory of optics has been reduced to the theory of electromagnetic radiation and (b) that the theory of optics is reduced in such it way that it is appropriate to identify light with electromagnetic radiation. Similarly, when we entertain the question of whether light is reducible to electromagnetic radiation, the fundamental question really is whether the theory of optics is reducible to the theory of electromagnetic radiation. Hence, when we raise the question of whether mental states are reducible to brain sates, this question must be posed first in terms of whether some theory concerning the nature of mental states is reducible to a theory describing how neuronal ensembles work, and second in terms of whether it reduces in such a way that the mental states of  TR can be identified with the neuronal states of TB.

— Neurophilosophy, Patricia Churchland