Intelligence is Immanent

A Process Model on the Becoming of Minds, Intelligence, and Knowledge

Author

Ven Gist

Published

October 23, 2026

Language

English

Traditional definitions of intelligence ask what it means to be intelligent. Aligning with Weaver Weinbaum's theory of open-ended intelligence, this essay asks what it means to become intelligent. It takes a transdisciplinary route through semiotics, epistemics, biology, phenomenology, and metaphysics to unfurl a process model of the becoming of knowledge and intelligence, framed as immanent — arising from within the field of virtuality itself, not from a transcendental beyond.

Intelligence is usually treated as a competence an agent has, a capacity for solving problems toward a goal. Intelligence is Immanent inverts that order. Drawing on Simondon's individuation, Weinbaum's open-ended intelligence, Peirce's interpretants, and Deleuze's plane of immanence, it argues that intelligence is the formative process by which thinking agents are constituted at all — knowledge individuating through encounter rather than cargo transmitted intact. The essay builds a process model in four movements — ingression, individuation, circulation, and egression — and asks what organizational forms (institutions, substrates, extitutions) sustain the conditions of further becoming, and which failure modes (over-convergence, over-variety, enclosure, circulation failures) terminate it. Intelligence belongs to no single mind; it is the spiraling itself.