Limits of PoC

PoC as “Glasses”

The Protocol of Consciousness (PoC) is not a “universal solvent” that dissolves every mystery of mind.

It is more like a pair of glasses: a device that changes how things come into view.\ Through these lenses, processes of consciousness that once seemed vague or ineffable can be described with sharp clarity. But glasses also narrow one’s vision. What they make visible, they may also obscure; what they clarify, they may simultaneously cut away.

What Escapes the Protocol

PoC offers a structural frame — Instantiation, Elicitation, Loop — through which many phenomena of consciousness can be translated and analyzed. Yet not all experience can be reduced to this frame. Tears before art, the warmth of an embrace, awe before a mountain or sunset — these contain a surplus that resists formalization.

The Qualia Plugin describes qualia as a broad form of instantiation, but it does not address the primordial question of why consciousness exists at all. Nor does PoC engage in ethical debates about whether its ideas should be implemented in social practice. What PoC provides is a framework for what can be translated — and a recognition of what necessarily remains beyond it.

How PoC Should Be Used

For this reason, PoC should not be treated as a totalizing theory.\ It works best as:

• A guiding line: a supplemental framework that offers new angles of approach.
• A translation tool: a shared vocabulary for connecting diverse traditions and fields.

When encountering phenomena that do not fit within PoC, this is not evidence of its failure. Rather, it is an opportunity to acknowledge the richness that lies beyond — to confirm that there is always more than what the protocol can describe.

Conclusion: Limits as Creative Space

PoC is a powerful way to formalize consciousness, but its strength lies equally in what it leaves unsaid. Its limits are not defects but the margin that keeps it alive as a tool.

To recognize these limits is not to weaken PoC, but to practice it ethically: to use it while allowing for the irreducible excess of life and experience.