Working definition. Imagination is the capacity to form, feel, and examine realities that are not currently given—and to return from them with new choices.
Inherited meaning
Imagination has alternately been distrusted as fantasy, celebrated as artistic genius, and studied as a faculty joining perception, memory, emotion, and reason. Its richest traditions do not oppose it to reality. They treat it as one of the ways humans perceive reality’s unfinished character.
Meaning in the imagination economy
In the imagination economy, imagination is not the ability to request more images. It is the scarce capacity to originate a meaningful possibility, hold it against convention, and specify it without extinguishing its life. Models can expand and recombine the available field; they cannot decide which future is worth wanting on our behalf.
What changes in practice
Train imagination by encountering unfamiliar worlds, reframing settled questions, making alternatives concrete, and comparing their consequences. Measure it not by strangeness, but by whether it makes a previously unavailable action thinkable.