The Reality of Human Freedom

Is Human Freedom just an Illusion?

B.F. Skinner is a behavioral psychologist. He took the extremely experiment with the rates that were conditioned to perform simple behaviors, such as pressing a lever or pecking at a disk, then to receive the food rewards. By stimulus animals in a general environment, he kept the animal from sex activity, building a nest, and feeding them in a physiological condition, the response was the animal did everything, such as turning toward or away from a light, jumping at a sound. The result was they did can do more highly organized activity. Could he shift his experience and theories directly to the human beings? Traditionally, based on the assumption behavior arised from the cause those were within the individual. All individual were held responsible for their conduct and given credit for their achievements. Skinner believed that the operant conditioning principles could, and should, be applied on a broad scale. The psychology experiment may need to minimize the human mind and the inner personalities as well as separated the self-determinism. He set the experiment in order to prove the man was the summation of his experiences and stimulates which intruded the consciousness and unconsciousness. As a result, he realized that the conditioning could be applied to explain human behavior because the subject matter of human psychology was only the behavior of the human being. For example, a child ride in a car over a dilapidated bridge, his father made jokes about the bridge collapsing and all of them falling into the river below. The father found this funny and so decided to do it whenever they crossed the bridge. Years later, the child has grown up and now is afraid to drive over any bridge.

We trust the most natural phenomena can be understood, quantified, predicted, and eventually controlled. The scientific revolution stalled at the gates of natural sciences, bypassing humans. We can predict where an electron will go and send a robot to Mars; but we cannot foresee and stop economic crises and no control over wars and battles. If we asked to predict phenomena we would think we should know the most about it. As an effect, today we can find out more about Jupiter than about the person who is next to us. However, between our ability to explore human behavior and study bacteria electrons are fundamental differences because the bacteria don't get annoyed at us when we put them under a microscope.