Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
A workspace, not a mind
Like a brain, the model has an internal space to ponder, but it is a predictive engine doing calculations, with no feelings, no sensory emotion, and no experience of the world.
One pass versus a loop
The workspace is a single forward pass: information goes in, the model thinks, and a final answer comes out. Humans are a loop. Signals travel back through the same circuits, so working memory feeds into inputs, which feed into outputs, and back around again.
Text-only inputs
The inputs differ as well. Humans process the world through images, sound, and touch, and the model's workspace only ever looks at text. Researchers still place it very far from consciousness.
How do philosophers separate kinds of consciousness?
Philosopher Ned Block distinguished access consciousness from phenomenal consciousness in a 1995 paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Access consciousness is information available for reasoning, speech, and control of action. Phenomenal consciousness is what an experience feels like from the inside. Block argued the two are distinct.
Where does the workspace idea come from?
Psychologist Bernard Baars proposed global workspace theory in 1988. It compares the mind to a theater, where a spotlight picks out one piece of information and broadcasts it to many unconscious processes. Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues later developed a neural version tied to brain imaging. A 2023 report by Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, and colleagues assessed AI systems against indicators drawn from such theories and concluded that no current system was a strong candidate.
Why does a loop matter for consciousness?
Victor Lamme's recurrent processing theory proposes that feedback from higher to lower visual areas, and not just a one-way sweep, is what makes perception conscious. A 2001 study by Alvaro Pascual-Leone and Vincent Walsh used magnetic stimulation to disrupt signals returning to early visual cortex. Participants stopped reporting awareness of a moving stimulus.
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