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Pablo_Stafforini comments on Why Eat Less Meat? - Less Wrong
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Consider an experience which, if had by an eight-year-old human, would be morally very bad, such as an experience of intense suffering. Now suppose that a chicken could have an experience that was phenomenally indistinguishable from that of the child. Would you be "very sure" that it would be very bad for this experience to be had by the human child, but not at all bad to be had by the chicken?
I smell a variation of Pascal's Mugging here. In Pascal's Mugging, you are told that you should consider a possibility with a small probability because the large consequence makes up for the fact that the probability is small. Here you are suggesting that someone may not be "very sure" (i.e. that he may have a small degree of uncertainty), but that even a small degree of uncertainty justifies becoming a vegetarian because something about the consequence of being wrong (presumably, multiplying by the high badness, though you don't explicitly say so) makes up for the fact that the degree of uncertainty is small.
"Phenomenally indistinguishable"... to whom?
In other words, what is the mind that's having both of these experiences and then attempting to distinguish between them?
Thomas Nagel famously pointed out that we can't know "what it's like" to be — in his example — a bat; even if we found our mind suddenly transplanted into the body of a bat, all we'd know is what's it's like for us to be a bat, not what it's like for the bat to be a bat. If our mind were transformed into the mind of a bat (and placed in a bat's body), we could not analyze our experiences in order to compare them with anything, nor, in that form, would we have comprehension of what it had been like to be a human.
Phenomenal properties are always, inherently, relative to a point of view — the point of view of the mind experiencing them. So it is entirely unclear to me what it means for two experiences, instantiated in organisms of very different species, to be "phenomenally indistinguishable".
When a subject is having a phenomenal experience, certain phenomenal properties are instantiated. In saying that two experiences are phenomenally indistinguishable, I simply meant that they instantiate the same phenomenal properties. As should be obvious, there need not be any mind having both experiences in order for them to be indistinguishable from one another. For example, two people looking at the same patch of red may have phenomenally indistinguishable visual experiences--experiences that instantiate the same property of phenomenal redness. I'm simply asking Jeff to imagine a chicken having a painful experience that instantiates the property of unpleasantness to the same degree that a human child does, when we believe that the child's painful experience is a morally bad thing.
Sorry, but this is not an accurate characterization of Nagel's argument.
How does this not apply to me imagining that I'm a toaster making toast? I can imagine a toaster having an experience all I want. That doesn't imply that an actual toaster can have that experience or anything which can be meaningfully compared to a human experience at all.
That's a view of phenomenal experience (namely, that phenomenal properties are intersubjectively comparable, and that "phenomenal properties" can be described from a third-person perspective) that is far, far from uncontroversial among professional philosophers, and I, personally, take it to be almost entirely unsupported (and probably unsupportable).
Intersubjective incomparability of color experiences is one of the classic examples of (alleged) intersubjective incomparability in the literature (cf. the huge piles of writing on the inverted spectrum problem, to which even I have contributed).
I really don't think this is a coherent thing to imagine. Once again — unpleasantness to whom? "Unpleasant" is not a one-place predicate.
If your objection is that Nagel only says that the structure of our minds and sensory organs does not allow us to imagine the what-it's-like-ness of being a bat, and does not mention transplantation and the like, then I grant it; but my extension of it is, imo, consistent with his thesis. The point, in any case, is that it doesn't make sense to speak of one mind having some experience which is generated by another mind (where "mind" is used broadly, in Nagel-esque examples, to include sensory modalities, i.e. sense organs and the brain hardware necessary to process their input; but in our example need not necessarily include input from the external world).
I don't think there's a God-given mapping from the set of Alice's possible subjective experiences to the set of Bob's possible subjective experiences. (This is why I think the inverted spectrum thing is meaningless.) We can define a mapping that maps each of Alice's qualia to the one Bob experiences in response to the same kind of sensory input, but 1) there's no guarantee it's one-to-one (colours as seen by young, non-colourblind people would be a best case scenario, but think about flavours), and 2) it would make your claim tautological and devoid of empirical content.
Nagel had no problems with taking objective attributes of experience -- e.g. indicia of suffering -- and comparing them for the purposes of political and moral debate. The equivalence or even comparability of subjective experience (whether between different humans or different species) is not necessary for an equivalence of moral depravity.