Scientific record
Phase: Concept formation. Priority: Third.
Current working position
Investigate spontaneous internally generated cognition, including associative drift, mind-wandering, incubation, unexpected cross-domain connection, and potentially useful idea emergence without immediate external task demand. The aim is to determine whether productive off-task cognition can be characterized and instantiated in AI models.
The handover (not included in this public selection: ../../docs/handovers/2026-10-06-migration-handover.txt) supplies this current formulation. The broader initialization version is preserved in the snapshot (not included in this public selection: ../../archive/migration-snapshots/2026-10-06-before-handover/projects/daydream/research-status.md). Definition changes are recorded in DEC-0002 (not included in this public selection: ../../decisions/decision-log.md#dec-0002--incorporate-the-migration-handover-and-constrain-fiction-with-literature).
Unresolved boundaries and evidence
The listed phenomena are not presumed identical, uniformly productive, or computationally reproducible. Their relationship to deliberate imagination, generative search, stochastic behavior, and innovation remains open. No mechanism or architecture is adopted. Incubation findings reviewed for Fiction provide related literature only, not Daydream findings or a transferred detector.
Only supplied framing, initialization, and handover incorporation are recorded for this program. No adopted testable hypotheses, protocols, datasets, runs underway, model implementations, evaluations, or empirical findings are recorded.
Near-term priorities
- Establish a rigorous definition of productive off-task cognition and its evidence requirements.
- Distinguish adjacent descriptions and computational behaviors.
- Determine whether a meaningful AI operationalization is possible.
See the question register. Remain exploratory while these are unresolved.