Pastorale. Music/Theatre by Trevor Wishart - ACE124.4

Adam and Eve playing. God makes stuffed animals and birds move and call. Adam and Eve offered food by mechanical means. Wishart on his ideas for using Skinner boxes and musicians on a mechanical clock, which he eventually centred on Skinner’s behaviourist ideas and on ideas of free will and determinism. God points out that this conflicts with notions of a mechanical universe and doesn’t enable any differentiation "between a living creature and a machine". The Silver Swan, an eighteenth-century automaton. Clockwork. God reads from Descartes who believed "the human body was just a sophisticated machine…", different from other living creatures in that it possessed rational consciousness. Rat maze. God points out that the argument is no longer convincing as animals can be conditioned. Adam and Eve and assorted stuffed animals and birds and a mechanical owl. More food.