I've never heard this before but I think it's reasonable. Imagine if you were simulating the universe in a computer and a creature within your simulation achieved consciousness. I think it would be fair to say your simulation had achieved consciousness, even if 99.999...% of the processing power was spent simulating the rest of the universe "unrelated" to the conscious part.
The interesting thing is everything is required as it happened for the universe to become conscious in the form of humans. E.g. supernova that generated the right heavy metals to stabilize the protein complexes that let our brain function.
Would love it if we could test other universes with different alpha constants to observe their conscious creatures. Maybe they would be human’ and human’’ etc :)
