# Project Imagination

Status: exploratory

**Priority:** Second, after Project Fiction and before Project Daydream.

## Working definition

Project Imagination studies deliberate possible-world construction: the ability to mentally generate, manipulate, explore, and evaluate hypothetical scenarios, futures, counterfactuals, objects, systems, environments, or states that are not presently given.

The project is less developed than Project Fiction. Its capability boundary, operational tasks, and hypotheses remain unresolved. A broad description of imagination does not yet establish a measurable target for computational reproduction.

**Research aim:** Understand how humans construct and reason over unreal but coherent possibilities, and determine whether this capability can be replicated in AI models. The [migration handover](../../docs/handovers/2026-10-06-migration-handover.txt) retains this working framing; it does not report new Imagination findings.

## Current priority

Sharpen the definition and distinguish the target from prediction, simulation, planning, creativity, and Project Fiction. Identify tasks that test deliberate construction and manipulation rather than assuming any generated hypothetical description demonstrates the capability.

No adopted methodology, dataset, experiment run, model architecture, evaluation, or finding is recorded in the current repository.

## Research records

- [Research question](research-question.md): working formulation and boundaries.
- [Hypotheses](hypotheses.md): no adopted hypotheses yet.
- [Methodology](methodology.md): questions that precede protocol selection.
- [Research status](research-status.md): current maturity, assumptions, and priorities.

Use `theory/`, `literature/`, `datasets/`, `experiments/`, `evaluations/`, `models/`, and `results/` as artifacts develop. Preserve superseded formulations in `archive/`; record substantive changes in the [research log](../../logs/research-log.md) and experiments in the [registry](../../experiments/registry.md).

Possible relationships with Project Fiction and Project Daydream remain open. A shared representational mechanism, if proposed, must not erase differences in task, intention, or evaluation.

## October 14 program context

[Hermes' current thesis](../../lab/mission.md) places this exploratory program in a study of possible minds. [The method](../../lab/hermes-method.md) requires functional possible-world construction beyond imaginative prose. Possible interaction with [Affect](../affect/README.md) remains a hypothesis. Existing second priority and unresolved measurement/implementation state remain.