I don't understand what it could possibly mean for an output or an algorithm to be consciousness. Consciousness, whatever it might be caused by or composed of, means subjective awareness of qualia.

Everything that exists can be described precisely by some physics or algorithm, down to the point where it's actually meaningless to differentiate between the algorithm and the process itself. If consciousness exists, there exists some algorithm that is exactly equivalent to it.

Saying the only response to any questions about consciousness is "I don't know" is equivalent to shielding consciousness with the holy eternal veil of mystery.

Within the fields of computational neuroscience and AI, we actually do know a great deal about the algorithms underlying the supposed mystery of 'consciousness'. We dont' know enough yet to engineer a conscious machine, but that isn't so far away.

We had a general idea of how the heart worked long before we made an artificial heart, and we are in a similar situation with the brain. But the brain happens to be more complex than the heart.