The frog-manikin holding the blue parasol umbrella: imaginative generativity in evolution, life, and consciousness
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we introduce a new perspective where imagination is identified as the generativity of mental imagery and imaginings, or imaginative generativity (IG), characterized by a diverse array of multisensory formats, symbolic types, and mental activities (mental synthesis). Reviewing evidence spanning the evolution of cognition in hominids and some nonhuman species, we highlight the significance of IG in Paleolithic symbolism and findings from experimental studies in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience on perception and mental imagery. Our analysis also includes a synthesis of extensive bibliometric literature. We conclude that imaginative consciousness and its phenomenology rely on vivid representing, a cognitive optimization strategy to navigate the challenges of instability, ambiguity, and limitations in perception, memory and consciousness, crucial for survival and adaptation. Our review suggests that imagination, akin to phenotypic traits, plays a critical role in natural selection, highlighting the importance of including cognitive process variations within the framework of natural selection. Our perspective not only deepens the understanding of evolutionary development but also emphasizes the importance of mental simulation and foresight as key components of evolutionary fitness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it