Scientist claims your memories are merely illusions

"Whether it is a beloved childhood recollection or the simple knowledge of what you had for breakfast, our memories often seem like the only things we can be certain of. But a group of leading physicists now argue that all of your memories could merely be an illusion. According to this bold theory, all of your recollections are more likely to arise from random fluctuations in space than from real past events."

"That would mean everything you currently remember about your life and the world has no more bearing on reality than your wildest dreams and fantasies. Scientists and philosophers call this idea the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis, after the Austrian mathematician Ludwig Boltzmann. It is the idea that the most likely situation is that your brain, complete with all its memories, sprang into existence at this very moment out of random chaos."

The Boltzmann Brain hypothesis proposes that entire brains with coherent memories can spontaneously form as rare random fluctuations in a high-entropy universe. Such spontaneously formed brains could contain exact present-state memories indistinguishable from memories produced by past events. Statistical mechanics and cosmological models with vast temporal or spatial scales can make those random fluctuations more probable than orderly universes with consistent histories. No fully rigorous argument relying only on established physics currently dispels the possibility of the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis. If the hypothesis holds, recollections could lack causal connection to an external past, rendering perceived continuity of experience an emergent illusion.

Read at Mail Online