Hermes Labs

Research status record

Research status

A source record supporting Project Imagination. Read the original account alongside its scope, dates, and limitations.

Research status
exploratory
Updated
In this record

Scientific record

Priority: Second, after Project Fiction.

Maturity: Less developed than Project Fiction. Capability definition, tasks, hypotheses, and methodology remain under development.

Current working position

Investigate deliberate possible-world construction: generating, manipulating, exploring, and evaluating hypothetical scenarios, futures, counterfactuals, objects, systems, environments, or states that are not presently given.

Assumptions and boundaries under review

The working framing treats deliberate possible-world construction as a candidate research target. Its separability from prediction, simulation, planning, creativity, and Project Fiction remains unestablished. No shared mechanism or model architecture is assumed.

Work recorded and underway

The supplied framing, repository initialization, and migration handover are recorded. The current aim is to understand human construction and reasoning over unreal but coherent possibilities and investigate computational replication. No adopted hypotheses, protocols, datasets, experimental attempts or runs underway, model implementations, evaluations, or findings are recorded here. Fiction's literature map does not automatically transfer its definitions or methods into this project.

Near-term priorities

  1. Sharpen the capability definition.
  2. Distinguish adjacent activities and the other Hermean Projects.
  3. Identify measurable tasks and defensible evaluation criteria.
  4. Develop research hypotheses.

The highest-priority unresolved question is what would make a task specifically measure deliberate possible-world construction. See research-question.md; preserve uncertainty as tasks and criteria are proposed.

Source History & Provenance

Publication and source

Public record
Selected public export · Scientific maturity is recorded separately.
Repository source
projects/imagination/research-status.md
Website snapshot
2026-10-25 (UTC)
Source date
2026-10-06 (Updated)
Version
No explicit version field is recorded in the source.

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