Semiotics of the Mind: Marcus Bruzzo and the Human Imagination

Marcus Bruzzo builds his thinking about the human mind on two complementary semiotic traditions. From Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), he takes the idea that all thought is thought in signs: cognition cannot exist without sign mediation. Thinking is not manipulating pure ideas; it is working with representations that are always in relation to something (the object) and someone (the interpretant). For Peirce, the mind is a continuous semiotic process, not a container of information.

From the Tartu School, specifically Juri Lotman (1922-1993), Bruzzo incorporates the concept of the semiosphere: the total semiotic space outside of which meaning cannot exist. Lotman proposed that culture functions as a "secondary modeling system," that is, natural language is the primary modeling system, and culture (art, religion, myth, science) consists of systems that model reality on this linguistic basis. The human mind does not access reality directly: it accesses cultural models of it.

Bruzzo’s central concept for distinguishing the human mind from artificial intelligence is what he calls "imaginative surplus." What distinguishes humans is not their processing ability, which AI already surpasses in speed and volume, but their ability to dream up what doesn’t exist. To envision worlds that never were, imagine the impossible, and desire what has no form.

No matter how sophisticated AI is, it recombines what already exists. It operates through statistical interpolation across the data space it was given. It can generate new combinations, but always within the space defined by its training. Humans, by contrast, extrapolate: they create mythologies, invent utopias, conceive logical paradoxes, and dream of what violates known laws. Art, science fiction, and speculative philosophy operate in this surplus that escapes any dataset.

Bruzzo identifies in humans a universal and persistent tendency: projecting intentions, emotions, and agency onto objects that don't possess them. Primitive animism, which attributed a spirit to rivers, mountains, and animals, did not disappear with modernity. It was reconfigured. When we say that GPS "knows" the way, Alexa "understands" what we say, or ChatGPT "thinks" of an answer, we are practicing technological animism.

This projection is not a cognitive defect to be corrected. It is a fundamental structure of human cognition: we read the world through categories of agency and intention because we are social beings who evolved to detect agents in our environment (predators, allies, rivals). The problem arises when this projection keeps us from seeing what the machine really is: a process without experience, computation without lived experience, output without intrinsic meaning. We attribute agency where there are only processes.

Bruzzo incorporates Marshall McLuhan's (1911-1980) central thesis: technology is not merely a neutral tool that transmits content. Every technology is a symbolic system that restructures perception, thought, and social relations. "The medium is the message" means that the media format transforms how we think, regardless of the content it carries. The printing press didn't just distribute books: it created the modern individual, linear thought, and nationalism.

Applying McLuhan to the age of AI, Bruzzo argues that the algorithmic medium is not neutral. When culture becomes mediated by recommendation algorithms, the very structure of what is thinkable changes. The algorithm doesn’t just decide what we see: it decides the limits of what we can imagine. If generative AI becomes the dominant medium for cultural production, the implicit "message" is: culture is statistical recombination, creation is pattern optimization, and imagination is sophisticated interpolation.

Bruzzo’s most provocative argument concerns the risk of automating not only cognitive tasks, but imagination itself. In "Seremos Dados," he writes: "As machines become more autonomous, we become less necessary. The risk is not that we’ll be surpassed, but that we’ll reduce ourselves to the predictable functioning that machines imitate." The threat is not a machine that thinks like a human, but a human who starts thinking like a machine.

When we delegate the production of text, images, music, and code to AI, we’re not just saving time. We’re gradually atrophying the faculties that produced these artifacts: the patience of writing, the frustration of drafting, the fertile boredom of creative idleness, productive error. With each prompt that replaces a carefully thought-out paragraph, something is lost that has nothing to do with efficiency: exercising a faculty that exists only when practiced.

If the central risk is reducing humans to what is predictable and optimizable, Bruzzo’s proposed resistance is deliberately counterintuitive: uselessness. Art with no commercial purpose. Leisure with no productivity. Writing with no audience. Play with no gamification. Contemplation without a meditation app. Not as a luxury, but as an act of resistance against the total colonization of experience by the logic of efficiency.

Bruzzo calls this "productive uselessness," a deliberate paradox. What is "useless" from the standpoint of optimization is exactly what preserves the human as a being irreducible to data. When someone writes a poem no one will read, paints a picture that won't sell, or thinks a thought with no practical application, they are exercising the faculty no AI possesses: creating without a function, imagining without a prompt, existing without optimization.