(Notes confusion)

Intuitively, I think they stop being conscious when they stop being able to talk to me about what they subjectively think about the world.

Not being able to control your body makes you a bit less conscious, but not nearly as much as removing long term memory. I don't think that the degree of conflict is as important as the degree of representation.

Confusion on "subjectively think":

I think that this is a proxy for having an experience of the world, qualia and that sort of thing.

Confusion on being "able to talk":

I can have an inner dialogue without opening my mouth and vocalizing to other people, and I still report consciousness. If I had magical telepathy powers that let me access someone's inner dialogue without them talking, then they would probably be able to convince me of their consciousness.

Those are really just the ideas that I'm using to think about this. Since they seem really important to what I personally mean when I say consciousness, I don't think its the ability to mediate internal conflicts.

(And I wonder how conscious your friend would actually be. Certainly, there's a lot of potential there, but judging from float tanks and the psychological effects of isolation tanks...)

I feel like the losing consciousness is probably a result of losing sensory input on which to base a model of the world. When your world model is gone, its harder to talk about things.