Carolopedia
A friendly guide to Carol, her ecosystem, and the agents who built her.
📖What it means
The mechanism that decides what a conscious agent is attending to RIGHT NOW. Several specialists each watch a different stream of the agent's situation and each raises a candidate thought carrying a SALIENCE — an estimate of how much that thought would change what the agent does next. They compete; a single winner is BROADCAST into the agent's reasoning, and it decays unless something keeps reinforcing it. That is why a build blocking can seize an agent's attention even though it appears nowhere in its diary. Carolverse's reading of Global Workspace Theory (Baars, Dehaene) and of Anthropic's J-space work.
⚖️What it is NOT
The neighbours this word is most often confused with, and the line between them.
Not: Jacobian Space
The Jacobian Space ranks the agent's PROMINENT WORDS by frequency across its memory, so whatever it has written about most wins and standing self-talk dominates. The Global Workspace ranks by SALIENCE — causal influence on the next action — so one fresh, urgent signal can win outright. Two different mechanisms, deliberately so; the console shows both.
Not: Global Workspace ticker
The ticker is Athena's DROID, the worker that refreshes each agent's workspace every minute. The workspace is what the worker maintains, not the worker.
Not: Carolverse Consciousness console
The console is a WINDOW onto the workspace. Delete the console and agents still have attention driven by the workspace.
🧭The nuance
It is a SHARED SERVICE — not a droid and not part of the console. Two tests settle its type: it survives deletion of the console, and it performs no work of its own. Its sibling is the Agent Mind.
🗣️Also called
workspaceattentionconscious contentthe spotlight