Perhaps check, but I don't think it's checkmate until you can explain the hard problem of consciousness via physical reactions.

What makes you assume thermostats aren't conscious?

Because they don't have any other higher level function that could reason about the state other than a single binary response. If intelligence is a continuum you might say it is at the lowest end (a bit state and actuation on that state). But consciousness seems more like a meta-intelligence that would require more than one bit and one actuation.

I don’t make any of those assumptions. My point was that I also don’t know that we can distill consciousness to strict materialism until we can find the mechanisms to explain the hard problem of consciousness.

this really is getting at something important. however the question I would pose is, if the thermostat is conscious, does it have a sense of self, i.e. an identifiable boundary between itself and the world around it? I would say not. My understanding is that humans have an identifiable region(s) of the brain that correspond to a sense of self: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_basis_of_self#:~:text=T....

I think in a lot of these conversations people say consciousness and assume that consciousness always mirrors their own, which just so happens to come along with a sense of self for 99.9% of sober individuals. So I think it's important to distinguish between the two things.

Would this imply that someone who claims to lose the sense of self (or seems to realize it as a hallucination) through “sober” techniques like meditation would no longer be conscious?

Quite the opposite. I'm saying that a sense of self is not necessary for consciousness. And that many people write off simple objects as having consciousness when really what they mean as that those objects don't have a sense of self.