This essay is extracted from a longer paper "Epistemic Coroners and Ontological Navigators: Toward a Process Philosophy of Generative AI in Architecture", arguing that generative AI systems structurally mirror concepts in process philosophy. This section explores Gilbert Simondon's framework of individuation and reveals how it directly applies to understanding latent space in generative AI—and why this changes everything about how architects should approach these systems.
Understanding Latent Space as a Metastable Field
By Richard Quittenton
March 2026, Bangkok Thailand
LaNa West
Introduction
This essay is extracted from a longer paper arguing that generative AI systems structurally mirror concepts in process philosophy. This section explores Gilbert Simondon's framework of individuation and reveals how it directly applies to understanding latent space in generative AI—and why this changes everything about how architects should approach these systems.
Understanding Latent Space via Simondon
To understand latent space, we must first understand the process of individuation. In his book Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, Gilbert Simondon inverts the traditional western philosophical categorization of the individual as the primary category by arguing instead that the process of individuation is primary. He asks us to stop trying to understand the individual by looking at the individual, and instead to seek understanding by looking at the process of individuation that creates it.
He uses the creation of a brick to explain this radical reframing. The clay is inanimate matter, and the mold is form imposed on it. According to conventional thinking, creating a brick is simply pressing the matter into the form. Simondon argues this is a profound conceptual error.
The clay—matter—used to make the brick is not passive. It has implicit form, a specific chemical makeup and moisture level that makes it adequate brick-making-clay. Furthermore the clay must be prepared, dug up, cleared of stones, uniformly hydrated and mixed to reach a specific state of plasticity before it can become a brick. The mold—form—is also not abstract. It has an implicit form of its own: wood grain, joints, imperfections, physical limits. It must be dusted or oiled before receiving the clay.
The critical moment comes when a craftsman presses the clay into the mold and the two push against each other. This is the individuation process for a brick. The precise moment of individuation happens when the clay's expansive pressure and the mold's restraining pressure equalize. Neither the matter nor the form determines the outcome alone. Individuation is the event where both actively participate.
To further explain this, Simondon introduces two crucial concepts: the preindividual and metastability.
The preindividual is what something is before it becomes an individual. The prepared clay is in a preindividual state before it individuates to become a brick. The prepared clay is metastable. A metastable state contains more potential individuals than the individuation of any one individual can exhaust.
He borrows the term supersaturation from chemistry to further explain this. A solution is supersaturated when it suspends more material than it normally should be able to at a given temperature. The solution will remain in liquid form until perturbed, at which point it transforms. Salt dissolved in water before it crystallizes is supersaturated. That solution contains infinite possible crystal formations—each one real as a potential, but none yet actual.
Simondon's metastability is latent structured potential. Every possible variation of salt crystals exists in the supersaturated water, and perturbing the water will cause one specific form of those crystals to materialize. Metastable clay can be pressed into many forms. The creation of one brick in one shape does not exhaust the plurality of forms possible to the clay—it simply becomes one form among many possible forms. The preindividual state is metastable, supersaturated with individuals that are real as potential, but do not exist as a specific form.
This ontological understanding of becoming allows Simondon to redefine information as an action. Information only exists when individuation is underway—it is a sizing up of the resolution of potential in a preindividual field. Supersaturated water and salt crystals are the same thing expressed at different levels of information. The liquid solution contains all the information of the crystal, just at a lower resolution.
Now consider a Variational Autoencoder (VAE)—the compressed latent space used in generative AI systems. A VAE is a metastable latent space. The image the VAE outputs is the VAE at a higher resolution. This observation is the bridge between Simondon's framework and how generative AI actually functions.
The VAE latent space is not a database of stored images, nor is it random noise. It is a structured field of statistical tensions whose geometry is shaped by training but whose specific outputs are not predetermined by it. It is prepared like brick-making-clay. VAE latent space is supersaturated with image-potential. Every possible outcome it can produce exists as real without being actual.
The generation process is the individuation process. When you initiate generation, the system moves from potential to actual—from the metastable field to a specific, concrete image. This is not retrieval. This is emergence. Just as salt crystals form from a supersaturated solution, images individuate from latent space.
If VAE latent space is the preindividual field, and generation is the individuation process, then the generated image is the individual: a temporary, specific form emerging from the preindividual field. The output from a generative AI is one specific enactment of its individuation process. Understood through this lens, the output and the latent space it comes from can be seen as the same thing at two different resolutions—the output has the same information as the VAE but at a higher degree of human legibility.
Navigation vs. Curation
Understanding latent space as a metastable field fundamentally changes how architects should engage with generative AI. You are not selecting from a menu. You are not retrieving pre-made forms. You are navigating a field of potential and participating in the emergence of form from that field.
This reframing opens entirely new possibilities for architectural practice—and it demands a new relationship to the tools we are using. The full paper explores how process philosophers Whitehead and Serres extend this framework, and what it means for architects to become navigators of these systems rather than consumers of their outputs.
Read the full paper: "Epistemic Coroners and Ontological Navigators: Toward a Process Philosophy of Generative AI in Architecture" on SSRN Full Paper