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Jordan comments on It's not like anything to be a bat - Less Wrong
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The anthropic principle is contingent on no additional information. For example, if sentient life exists elsewhere in the universe, your odds of being a human are vanishingly small. This would suggest sentient life does not exist elsewhere in the universe. However, given that there appears to be nothing so special about earth that it wouldn't reoccur many times among trillions and trillions of stars, we can still conclude that sentient life does likely exist elsewhere in the universe.
Similarly, in this context, the fact that animals have brains that are relatively similar to ours itself gives you evidence with which to refine the anthropic argument. As you said, that hard line between experience-having and not-experience having would be weird. Thus, evidence from the observed universe trumps, or at least significantly adjusts, the anthropic argument.
It seems to take very tiny pieces of evidence to destroy a lot of anthropic reasoning, which is why, as much as I'd enjoy me some fillet-'o-chimp, I don't generally trust anthropic reasoning as a stopping point; we can often improve on it with available information.
True, assuming sentient life is common enough.
Not true. This is like saying that if you roll a million sided die and get 362,853 then the die must have been fixed because the chance of getting 362,853 is 1-in-a-million!
Were that appropriate, the same mechanism would also defeat the reasoning in this post. While I agree with your ultimate conclusion, using solely the anthropic principle and no additional information, I believe you are compelled to conclude extraterrestrial life does not exist.
I disagree. There is a natural category (sentience, reflectivity, etc.) that picks out humans over other Earthly animals and leads to a more-than-max-entropy prior for humans being more anthropically special*; this is not the case for either 362,853 or Earth.
* If you accept anthropic reasoning at all, that is. I'm sort of playing devil's advocate in this comment; this post mostly just pushes me further towards biting the bullet of UDT/collapsing epistemology to decision theory.