Why is color change between quarks without consequence? As always I will preface this question with the fact that I only have a high school education, so I may be overlooking something, or unaware of something that is inherent to the question.
That being said, as I understand it, in QCD color represents the strength of the strong force on a given quark. Additionally a baryon must be color neutral in composition. However, quarks of different color behave identically. Why do these quarks behave the same if they are affected by the strong force differently?
I've been thinking about this a bit, and the only thing that I can think of is that as gluons are particles that carry the strong force the difference is what gluons the quarks are able to interact with, and since color is conserved the baryon is able to persist through these color changes.
Am I on the right track with this or is there something else going on here?
 A: Quarks can be RGB color, but color charges are paired (color with anticolor) but there is no gauge invariant meaning of the color. Now gluons do not have a definite color, they are in a superposition of colors and quarks have temporarily a color for a given feynman diagram, which is the only way we know how to display their interactions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_charge
Now when one quark interacts with another (different color), the mediator is a gluon so that the quarks swap color.
There are basically two reasons why the quarks color swap is confusing:


*

*even three quarks (which is not the real picture of a proton or neutron) are constantly exchanging gluons and so swapping their color 

*the three valence quark model is not realistic, because in reality, the protons and neutrons consist of a sea of quarks, antiquarks and gluons constantly interacting, appearing, disappearing, and only if you take the remaining valence quarks will you see theoretically three quarks.

The quarks and antiquarks are constantly interacting, swapping color, and it is the proton or neutron itself that needs to be color neutral.
You say that the swapping of color does not have any consequences on the quark itself, which is correct, since they are in confinement. We have never experimentally seen quarks outside of confinement, so how would we be able to tell if they (different color) behave identically.
You are saying that the difference is, that the different color quarks are interacting via different color gluons, correct, but these are all in superpositions of states.
So the answer to your question is that the different color quarks might behave differently, but we would need to experimentally see that outside confinement.
