The key point I will remember from reading this post is that the anthropic Doomsday argument can safely be put away in a box labelled 'muddled thinking about consciousness' alongside 'how can you get blue from not-blue?', 'if a tree falls in a forest with nobody there does it make a sound?' and 'why do quantum events collapse when someone observes them?'.

There are situations in which anthropic reasoning can be used but it is a mistake to think that this is because of the ability of a bunch of atoms to perform the class of processing we happen to describe as consciousness.