For those who are realists or materialists or, however they identify their philosophy, fundamentally believe that consciousness is simply a product of evolution of physical systems and is biologies means of interacting physically with the world, the existence of imagination is much less confounding if we place it in the context of anticipation of the future.

Imagination is internal simulation or construction of environments, relationships and ideas strictly within the mind but that can be demonstrated physically if desired.
This is very much useful for survival alone and need not come about for any other reason than that. To know the future or the likely passage of near events is massively useful for survival but requires the manifestation of experience that doesn’t yet exist outside the mind and perhaps may never come to fruition.

So evolution could generate imagination, creativity etc out of necessity due to accelerated and fiercely intelligent competition. The irony of acknowledging this as possibility is that I myself don’t actually believe imagination is the product of evolution or at least I don’t restrict the process of evolution (and therefore it’s products) solely to biology. I would take a universal emergence kind of perspective.

Anyways, thoughts?