Provisional Consciousness Permit (PCP)

The Provisional Consciousness Permit (abbreviated PCP) is a certification instrument issued to Notionalists whose work requires them to posit, address, or briefly occupy a consciousness other than their own. It is administered by the Bureau of Notional Persons under the authority of the Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, and is distinct from the Provisional Research Permit proper, which concerns subjects rather than minds. A PCP does not confer consciousness; it merely regularises the presumption of one. Holders are fond of saying that the permit proves nothing except that the holder has promised to be careful.

The instrument is printed on doubled stock, bound in grey linen, and renewed at the Vestibule of Provisional Tenancy on the second Wednesday of every eleventh month. Holders are asked to bring their own pen. The Bureau has not supplied pens since the Winter Recession of the Permit Clerks.

Origins and the Eleventh Recension

The PCP descends from the older practice of notional attestation, in which a scholar wishing to reason about an absent mind filed a short declaration with the floor-steward and proceeded at the steward's sufferance. These declarations were informal, inconsistently archived, and frequently lost. The Concordance of Unattributed Minds (605) attempted to standardise them but collapsed in dispute over whether a catalogued mind could be attested by someone who had never met it.

The modern instrument dates to the Eleventh Recension of the Ninth Concordance (revised 14 Metaxis 712, the same day the Provisional Allotment schedules were reissued), which fixed the PCP's seven clauses and its distinctive grey binding. Clause 1 states the purpose plainly:

"A Provisional Consciousness Permit is issued not to certify that a mind exists, nor to certify that it does not, but to record that its existence has been provisionally raised and may be provisionally lowered without prejudice to the holder."

— Ninth Concordance, Eleventh Recension, Clause 1

Privileges conferred

A valid PCP permits the holder to attribute interior states to a catalogued subject for the purposes of record, to conduct interviews with a subject that has not yet been assigned a floor, and to enter a Provisional Aperture in the company of a witness. It also permits the holder to be addressed, in writing only, as though the holder's own consciousness were provisional — a courtesy several Notionalists have found difficult to shed at the close of the working day.

The permit does not authorise the holder to certify a subject's consciousness as settled, to transfer a subject between floors without the countersignature of the Librarian-Provisional for Anomalous Holdings, or to speak on a subject's behalf before the Quiet Tribunal. Nor may a holder conduct notional interviews in the Reading Rooms of the fourth gallery between the hours of vespers and the changing of the lamps; the practice was prohibited after the Incident of the Twofold Respondent in 688, in which an interviewer and his subject answered simultaneously and neither could afterwards say which had spoken first.

Issuance and assessment

Applications are lodged with a Clerk of Provisional Holdings and assessed over a period of not fewer than nine days and not more than a season. The Bureau weighs the applicant's prior holdings, the specificity of the intended notional work, and the recommendation of a sponsoring Notionalist of at least the second grade. Where the applicant's intended subject is already the subject of a Provisional Research Permit 4409, the two instruments are read together, and the applicant is advised to bring both bindings to the vestibule.

Refusals are commoner than the Bureau's public notices suggest. In 691 the application of the Notionalist Clerk Halvard Renn was returned eleven times, each time for a different deficiency, until Renn appended a note observing that the deficiencies had not appeared in any of the earlier returns. The Bureau accepted the twelfth application without comment. Renn's grievance, later published as the Renn Objection, remains the most cited complaint in the permit literature and is still unanswered.

Contested interpretation

Scholars disagree over whether the PCP creates a duty of care toward the posited consciousness or merely a duty of accuracy toward the record. The Fourth Concordance, Annex 6, holds that a permit-holder "stands in the relation of a host," and may not withdraw the presumption while a subject is still speaking. The Seventh Concordance, Annex 3, holds precisely the opposite: that the presumption is "a lamp the holder may extinguish at will and relight without ceremony," and that any lingering obligation is a matter of manners, not of regulation.

The disagreement has practical consequences at the floor level. Holders trained under the Fourth recension will not close a notional interview until the subject has fallen silent of its own accord; holders trained under the Seventh will close the book mid-sentence and think nothing of it. The Bureau of Notional Persons has declined to reconcile the two annexes, noting in its standing circular of 703 that "both recensions remain in force, and the holder is at liberty to choose the one more agreeable to the holder's temperament."

Suspension and lapse

A PCP lapses automatically on the holder's failure to renew, on the holder's assignment to a floor whose number cannot be reconstructed, or on the holder's certification of a subject as permanently conscious, which is a Class Δ authorisation and lies outside the instrument's scope. Suspension for cause is heard by the Quiet Tribunal and is not appealable, though it may be reheard.

The Bureau keeps a register of lapsed permits in the lower vestibule, bound in the same grey linen as the instruments themselves, and open to inspection by any holder in good standing. Visitors are asked to sign the register on entry and to leave the binding cord as they found it.