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Epistemology is the study of the validity and veracity of knowledge.  It
includes how we know what we know, it seeks to answer whether our
spontaneous convictions are justified and whether and to what extent Man's
mind can contact reality, what is.  In addressing these issues when
studying epistemology, one develops an understanding of the laws and nature
of thinking because that's necessary in order to develop an understanding
of the truth-value of knowledge.

So, in thinking of a game of some sort that would particularly stimulate
men in our mid-forties and later, I was thinking it has to inform the
player, to focus him, to make him consider and, ideally, feel the novelty
of his own consciousness.  I imagined such a game's great payoff could be a
dynamically-generated solution or restatement of a player-supplied problem.

This means the program would have to be able to take in the nature of a
problem or a situation, manipulate its principles and output it with a
twist, that is, with a novel form or with new substance, novel methods,
mechnisms or procedures or even with a modified goal.

How ever to translate all this into source code?  What ever would such a
program *be*?  How can you code consciousness or awareness?  That's the
question I was implying and this is a very terse but concise articulation
of the basis for the question.  Now, for the start of the answer.

Knowledge is one of the most mysterious entities.  Think how you come to
know something.  You see a house.  It is on fire!  Immediately, you
recognize it for what it is.  You whirl around to see if any assistance is
coming, you whip out your cell to call.  All this is with an image of the
burning house in your mind.  How did that image get there?  Did the house
move into your mind?  No, it is still outside you.  Did you move into the
house, into the fire?  No, you are unharmed, unburned and still outside the
house.  What has taken place?  How do you know about this house?  You
collected information about it from your senses, yet you do not confuse
this with a movie of a burning house or with memories of other burning
houses.

How do you know what I've been describing?  In talking about an event or an
experience, we've generated an event and an experience.  This happened via
language and its words.  The former, the actual experience, requires its
own elucidation and that discussion of the role and validity of sense
experience and its interpretations, but the latter experience, with the
words, is where I want to lead you now.  The words are repositories of
knowledge.  They are constituted of ideas that reach into our minds to
construct conscious awareness and experience, and of a reality that
connects into Being, into the is of what is, inasmuch as they do indeed
relate to reality.

We know words can  indeed relate to reality since we agree to a great
extent on the effect and meaning of arbitrary words and collections of
words.  This is one of the great advances most of us make as we get older,
we gain great assurance as to the agreements about words we both share and
dispute.

We handle a number of fundamental ideas in our words in our languages and
build upon them.  I've defined a handful of categories of fundamental ideas
and compiled a few hundred words that seem to flesh out these categories.
I'm up to correlating each word of these categories with each other, both
strictly within categories and crossing over from one category into
another.

The correlations occur on a number of levels.  Take "high" and "arm" (the
body part).  When you put them together or near each other in a phrase or a
sentence, what do you effect, what can you possibly mean?  A raised arm, a
mighty arm, a mighty act, an act of strong leadership, or, to the contrary,
a presumption, an inappropriate taking.  By what algorithm can you generate
meaningful or potentially meaningful correlations?  What organization is
admitted by connections between words?  What correlations do people find
among words?  I've associated processes with each of the types of
organization that words can admit and with that, you can begin to
understand where programming can play a role.

So, what about a game that uses this?  I loved listening to the Yankees-Red
Sox game on the radio.  The two announcers on the radio in the New York
area, John Sterling and Charlie Steiner, made the games come alive for me,
really gave them life for me.  I didn't pay attention to a single baseball
game the whole season, but, in listening to these guys on the radio
experience the game, I was captured.  I loved it.  That's the sort of thing
I want to bring to a computer game.