It surprises people like Greg Egan, and they're not entirely stupid, because brains are Turing complete modulo the finite memory - there's no analogue of that for visible wavelengths.
There's the halting problem, so here you go. There's also the thoughts that you'll never arrive at because your arriver at the thoughts won't reach them, even if you could think them if told of them.
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules: