'Magnum, p.i' ran between 1980 and 1988. In the episode 'Memories Are Forever' shown in November 1981, Magnum was heard saying, "Dreams are supposed to represent your subconscious wishes and conflicts, sort of a private movie you write, produce and direct, only you can hide your eyes in your dreams even when they're scaring you to death."
Writer Donald P. Bellisario shared, "What happens is, I don't even do a story. I sit down with a typewriter and I start writing and it takes me some place. I’m just as much a viewer of my own shows as I write it, as the viewers are when they see it. I don’t plot the story all the way out. Most writers do. They plot a story all the way through. I’ll have either a beginning, or sometimes I have an ending in mind and I’ll write from it, or to it. I didn’t sit and plot it out with the idea that I wanted to do a show with Vietnam vets. What happened was that as it went along and I was writing Magnum's character and his friends, I decided I knew how they got together, they all served in Vietnam. That’s what their connection is."
Donald also made the observation, "The thing about 'Magnum' that people don’t understand is that it’s a very hard show to write. I’ve got tons of writers who think they know the show, and they either write macho or they write him as a fool. Magnum is vulnerable. Magnum makes mistakes, right up to where it really counts...I love doing a 'Magnum' where the audience has to figure it out as it goes along and Magnum just beats them to it. I love the twists."
Also in 1980, Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove was awarded what described as a "first-of-its-kind degree" - a Ph.D. in parapsychology. Dr. Mishlove made the comment at the time, "Even 100 years after the beginning of psychic research, our culture still associates parapsychology with superstition, fraud, astrology and cults like the People's Temple. Yet, parapsychology – the study of such paranormal phenomena as ESP and 'psychokinesis', or mind over matter – has been officially recognized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science."
Dr. Mishlove's book, 'The Roots of Consciousness' was published in 1975, "There were too many things...that happened to me. I decided I couldn’t just dismiss them, that they were more than a chance coincidence." In an interview in 2006, he conceded, "Knowledge in the field of parapsychology grows very slowly. That’s why much of what I am posting on this blog from my 1980 doctoral dissertation, 'PSI* Development Systems', is still quite valid and up-to-date. 'The Roots of Consciousness' was revised in 1989. That edition is now on the web..."
Insisting "remote viewing is real", Dr. Mishlove made the point, "Actually, survey studies show that – among the general public – most people believe in matters associated with the paranormal. But, there is enormous social pressure upon people to conform to more conventional, materialist ways of thinking – and to dismiss Psi claims as related to superstition and error."
John McCarthy wrote the book, 'Thinking Allowed', published in 1995. He made known, "I started my work in artificial intelligence in about 1956, although I became really interested in it before that, in 1949, when I was a beginning graduate student in mathematics. I would say that the field has made somewhat less progress than I hoped, although I didn't have any definite opinion as to how fast it would progress. I think that it had and still has difficult conceptual problems to solve before we can get computer programs that are as intelligent as humans."
"One part of the problem," John McCarthy believed, "is to develop language in which we can express for our computer programs the facts and reasoning about the common-sense world that humans have, and that is necessary in order to behave intelligently. A machine isn't the sum of its parts. If somebody took a car apart and gave you a heap of the parts, that wouldn't be a car. They have to be connected in a specified way and interacting in a specified way, and so if you want to say that the mind is a structure composed of parts interacting in a specialized way, I would agree with that, but it isn't just a heap of them."
