Why the Brain Cannot Be a Computer
A new paper argues that the human brain cannot function as a classical digital computer. The research highlights that the information required to specify conscious states exceeds the brain's physical information capacity. This suggests that alternative information processing mechanisms may be necessary to understand consciousness.
- ▪The paper presents an information-theoretic proof regarding the limitations of the human brain as a digital computer.
- ▪It quantifies distinguishable conscious states and their historical dependencies.
- ▪The analysis shows that the minimum information required for conscious states significantly surpasses the brain's storage capabilities.
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Record
| Original publisher | arXiv.org |
| Canonical URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10518 |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 21:42:15 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T21:57:40.700Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T21:57:40.700Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | O5pnDbkKyysM |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Physics > History and Philosophy of Physics arXiv:2503.10518 (physics) [Submitted on 13 Mar 2025] Title:Why the Brain Cannot Be a Digital Computer: History-Dependence and the Computational Limits of Consciousness Authors:Andrew Knight View a PDF of the paper titled Why the Brain Cannot Be a Digital Computer: History-Dependence and the Computational Limits of Consciousness, by Andrew Knight View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:This paper presents a novel information-theoretic proof demonstrating that the human brain as currently understood cannot function as a classical digital computer.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at arXiv.org.
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