I imagine the author of the article would say you are still conscious while zoned out, just not necessarily self-aware about it. Your mind contains an internal representation of the world and your place in it, just not also a high-order self-reflective representation of your own thought processes at the time. There's a lot of ways people divide consciousness into levels of low vs high order, cortical vs sub-cortical, or whatever to capture such nuances.

I think it is very interesting in terms of creating an artificial conscious program. Obviously we can reduce the definition so much it seems absurd to call it conscious, at least to me. But there may be some basic level of ability to form meta-representations that is the key.