...at least not if you accept a certain line of anthropic argument.
Thomas Nagel famously challenged the philosophical world to come to terms with qualia in his essay "What is it Like to Be a Bat?". Bats, with sensory systems so completely different from those of humans, must have exotic bat qualia that we could never imagine. Even if we deduce all the physical principles behind echolocation, even if we could specify the movement of every atom in a bat's senses and nervous system that represents its knowledge of where an echolocated insect is, we still have no idea what it's like to feel a subjective echolocation quale.
Anthropic reasoning is the idea that you can reason conditioning on your own existence. For example, the Doomsday Argument says that you would be more likely to exist in the present day if the overall number of future humans was medium-sized instead of humongous, therefore since you exist in the present day, there must be only a medium-sized number of future humans, and the apocalypse must be nigh, for values of nigh equal to "within a few hundred years or so".
The Buddhists have a parable to motivate young seekers after enlightenment. They say - there are zillions upon zillions of insects, trillions upon trillions of lesser animals, and only a relative handful of human beings. For a reincarnating soul to be born as a human being, then, is a rare and precious gift, and an opportunity that should be seized with great enthusiasm, as it will be endless eons before it comes around again.
Whatever one thinks of reincarnation, the parable raises an interesting point. Considering the vast number of non-human animals compared to humans, the probability of being a human is vanishingly low. Therefore, chances are that if I could be an animal, I would be. This makes a strong anthropic argument that it is impossible for me to be an animal.
The phrase "for me to be an animal" may sound nonsensical, but "why am I me, rather than an animal?" is not obviously sillier than "why am I me, rather than a person from the far future?". If the doomsday argument is sufficient to prove that some catastrophe is preventing me from being one of a trillion spacefaring citizens of the colonized galaxy, this argument hints that something is preventing me from being one of a trillion bats or birds or insects.
And this could be that animals lack subjective experience. This would explain quite nicely why I'm not an animal: because you can't be an animal, any more than you can be a toaster. So Thomas Nagel can stop worrying about what it's like to be a bat, and the rest of us can eat veal and foie gras guilt-free.
But before we break out the dolphin sausages - this is a pretty weird conclusion. It suggests there's a qualitative and discontinuous difference between the nervous system of other beings and our own, not just in what capacities they have but in the way they cause experience. It should make dualists a little bit happier and materialists a little bit more confused (though it's far from knockout proof of either).
The most significant objection I can think of is that it is significant not that we are beings with experiences, but that we know we are beings with experiences and can self-identify as conscious - a distinction that applies only to humans and maybe to some species like apes and dolphins who are rare enough not to throw off the numbers. But why can't we use the reference class of conscious beings if we want to? One might as well consider it significant only that we are beings who make anthropic arguments, and imagine there will be no Doomsday but that anthropic reasoning will fall out of favor in a few decades.
But I still don't fully accept this argument, and I'd be pretty happy if someone could find a more substantial flaw in it.
I think you need to be taken outside and shot...
...
...j/k.
It's just that over recent years I've spent quite a long time arguing with people educated principally in philosophy, who hate Dennett and think his version of materialism is absurd (or at least that it's manifestly wrong), and think it's absolutely essential to go around saying things like 'all we know about are correlations between body and mind'.
It's sort-of interesting/refreshing for me to arrive here, with a bunch of people who are (I assume) educated principally in computer science (with perhaps a few mathies and physicists), who are almost unanimously Dennett fans, think that functionalism is just blindingly obvious, that 'zombies' are blindingly obviously impossible, that it's blindingly obvious that the 'Systems Reply' is correct, that anything we build capable of passing the (full) Turing Test would have to be conscious etc.
The ones who don't 'get it' - that at the core of Dennett's view there's the difficult-to-swallow idea that there isn't a 'fact of the matter' as to whether a being is conscious and if so what it's conscious of - can at least fall back on a Greg Egan-style view of consciousness which is identical insofar as it agrees that the issues above are 'blindingly obvious'. (That's the other thing: the people here have actually read Greg Egan - woohoo.)
I can see you have a more in common with the philosopher-types than the locals. And actually, in your interpretation of Dennett I think there's a mistake - one I've seen elsewhere:
You think that in abolishing the 'Cartesian theater' he is ipso facto abolishing phenomenal awareness, but this simply doesn't follow. What he's abolishing is the idea that all of the 'bits' of a person's awareness are present 'together' in a single sharply-defined 'moment', such that there are well-defined answers to questions like "am I seeing a moving dot or a static one?" which would resolve the "Orwellian/Stalinesque" dilemma.
Even after the Cartesian theater is abolished, you can still be a dualist as long as you're prepared to give ground on things like 'the unity of consciousness', and admit that the various parts of the mindscape are slightly removed from each other - not as far removed as the mind of a different person altogether, or even as far as the two hemiminds of a split-brain patient, but certainly not bundled together in a brilliant 'point' of 'inner light'.
I'd just come back as a zombie.
That sums it up well. Next up, let's consider other startling possibilities, such as: there isn't a fact of the matter as to whether you're reading this sentence, there isn't a fact of the matter as to whether this planet exists, there isn't a fact of the matter as to whether there is a fact of the matter as to whether a being is conscious...