When Mike Pelizzari suggested this topic, I was watching a 1963 episode of Perry Mason called "The Shifty Shoe Box" which featured a favorite young actor of ours, Billy Mumy, whom Mike’s toy Lost In Space Robot refers to. "Danger, Will Robinson" it says. Mumy’s character we know as Will Robinson, but was called Miles on Perry Mason. On that show he found a gun and put it in a shoebox and hid it under the house where he lived with a foster parent woman ("Aunt Syl") and her lazy, shifty brother ("Uncle Flick"). The gun was Miles’ "secret", but Perry took an interest in Miles and knew he was hiding something. Miles saw Flick look for the gun later and thought he might be guilty of the reported armed theft from the office where the sister worked nearby, so he didn’t want to say. Meanwhile the episode’s actual murderer, played by Denver Pyle, had watched Miles and knew where this gun was, and he took it out of the box and used it on his victim at the office. Then the foster parent woman found the empty box and handled it, leaving her fingerprints on it. Finally Miles found the gun back in the box and got on the bus and took the murder weapon to court where Perry Mason was defending Miles’ foster woman parent for murder. "Young man, I want to thank you" said the Judge. I think this was young Mumy’s finest TV performance.
I also once shared with Mike and Catherine and other friends how the 2006 movie "The Ultimate Gift" told the archetypal "hero’s journey" story of growing up, self-discovery and spiritual quest as made famous by Joseph Campbell, and how this movie’s story corresponded to the tarot’s numbered trump card sequence that also tells the same kind of story. The young hero, Jason Stevens, perhaps named after Jason and the Argonauts by the author, was invited to sit at a table with the executor of his newly-deceased rich grandfather’s will. "What’s in the box"? Jason asks, seeing it there on the table. "Your inheritance" said the executor. The box turned out to contain a series of challenging tasks to complete before he could get his ultimate gift.
We all know about Pandora’s box too. When we open it, trouble comes out. In these two cases, it was either a murder gun, or a series of dangerous tasks to perform that came out of the box. But the last item in Pandora’s box was hope. Jason found 2 billion dollars in the box, and a willingness to use his money to help others. But what hope did Miles find? Mumy played in 3 Twilight Zone episodes. This means Mumy, and thus Miles, knows that the Twilight Zone is a dimension of imagination. On The Star tarot card, imagination is the same as hope, because it opens possibilities.
On Perry Mason, Miles helped free the foster sister, and her bothersome brother moved away. But where did Miles go then, and what did he do? Was this the start of a hero’s journey with lots of tasks to perform? Did he fly off into space and get lost there with the robot and Dr. Smith? We could invent many stories about Miles. I just have a few ideas.
Miles was smart and an avid reader. He probably read a lot more about his hero Perry Mason, and therefore he loved mystery stories. But he became averse to murders and guns, although not to boxes. He wanted to imagine more about science instead so he read about Schrodinger’s Cat, a thought experiment about quantum superposition in which he put a cat in a box with poison. Neils Bohr proposed that a quanta at the atomic level can both exist and not exist simultaneously if not observed, even though according to Schrodinger a cat is probably still either alive or dead in that box when we don’t observe it.
Quantum superposition is true though, on the quantum level, and it makes quantum computers powerful on OUR level. Of course, computers helped make it possible for Will Robinson to get lost in space with his robot, and maybe computers and their AI is why robots will soon take over the world and kill us all. That last part is not so hopeful. But it certainly seems that science and computers have opened pandora’s box.
The hope may be that Schrodinger’s Cat reminds us of George Berkeley’s thought experiment, not about a cat, but about a tree. If it falls in a forest, and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? Maybe there’s some hope there. If we all ignore Will Robinson’s robots, will they all disappear because we don’t look at them? This is what Miles began to wonder about by the time robots seemed to be taking over in the 21st century. Maybe robots, or humans, can only disappear in the Twilight Zone, but as Billy Mumy he often occupied it when he was young. And in Perry Mason Miles had to deal with a shifty shoe box in which a gun seemed to both be there and not there at almost the same time. And maybe in the Zone Billy is superimposed with Miles, Will and Jason too.
So if Schrodinger’s Cat is like Berkeley’s Tree, then we might remember that robots are made instead of grow, so that they may not have a subjective life, which is the observer that needs to be on hand for objects to be known and heard. Humans retain that advantage over robots, and that’s the hope. Let’s take that spiritual hero’s journey, discover our subjective life, and advance quantum powers in ourselves, and not in the robots which we can still make disappear, and probably should!
The Most Surprising Cat my essay for our follow-up topic at the meeting
Billy Mumy scene from The Shifty Shoe Box
what’s in the box? The Ultimate Gift preview
ABC News This Week: AI could kill us all! This Week with George Stephanopoulos Full Broadcast - Sunday, September 13, 2026. George, and Martha Raditz, came up in our band of writers discussion.
Berkeley Limerick (is the tree in the quad if noone's there?)