The Illusion of Reality

The Illusion of Reality considers information as the subject matter for scientific investigation. The book's objectives are to provide a framework for the study of information as a science; to abstract general principles that govern and constrain information processing and information structures; to illustrate the general principles by examples drawn from the physical and biological sciences and from the theory of computation; and to apply the theoretical approach presented in the book to several interesting new problems. The most important feature of the book is to present a unified approach to the study of information which can be used to view results and applications in the fields of statistical and quantum physics, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, computer science, and communication engineering. This approach is illustrated through results in the foundations of the theory of measurements and in machine and human visual information processing. The book should be of interest to both practitioners and students in the above-mentioned fields.