Dear Rajiv,
thanks for reading and considering my essay! I will try to answer what you brought up:
"How does it fair against the existence of consciousness? Must we necessarily know the possibility or necessity of existence of consciousness, before we can have consciousness? "
You eventually misunderstood what I wrote about. I wrote about things we yet don't know if they exist or or do not exist. Consciousness does not fall under that category - since we know that it does exist, independent of knowing whether consciousness is "necessary" or merely possible. I wrote for example about the idea of a multiverse, for which we yet do not know if it only exists as an idea of scientists or if it physically exists "out there". Same for a "platonic" realm of mathematics.
"You state, "Despite our problems to decide between the above mentioned modalities, we nonetheless obviously can know a truth that mathematical systems or machines presumably never can know. We know that machines and thus, their algorithms, lack the needed ontological awareness of the terms 'possible', 'necessary' and 'impossible..." "
O.k., maybe you made a false inference out of that - if I interpret your lines of reasoning correctly. So to clarify: machines may become conscious, but in that case my assumption is that the "algorithmic" activity for that to happen will be such complex that no scientist can trace this activity - in other words, no one them will be able to point to those parts of that algorithmic activity that initialize a state of conscious awareness within these machines - consciousness will then be a non-formalizable feature of such a machine. If you like, you then can term a brain to be such a machine.
"You seem to take a position in terms of possibles and impossibles "
Well, not quite. Because I think that nobody really can neatly separate the possible from the impossible - how should one every be able to do that and on what logical basis? So I do not argue for the possibility that we could somewhat obtain complete lists of the impossibles or the possibles. But as you may suspect, one impossibility that I think can be inferred is exactly that such lists aren't obtainable - because how can some little brains like us gain the needed information for such lists without being at the same footing as let's say God?
Hope that clarifies your questions.
Best wishes,
Stefan