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  • Essay / The Reality of Human Freedom - 1006

    Is human freedom just an illusion?BF Skinner is a behavioral psychologist. He did the extreme experiment with rates that were conditioned to perform simple behaviors, like pressing a lever or pecking at a disc, and then receiving food rewards. By stimulating the animals in a general environment, he prevented the animal from sexual activity, built a nest and nourished it in a physiological state. The answer was that the animal did everything from turning toward or away from a light to jumping at the sound of a noise. . The result was that they could carry out more highly organized activities. Could he transfer his experience and theories directly to human beings? Traditionally, it was assumed that behavior arises from the cause within the individual. All individuals were held accountable for their conduct and were recognized for their achievements. Skinner believed that the principles of operant conditioning could and should be applied on a large scale. The psychological experiment may have to minimize the human mind and inner personalities, as well as separate self-determinism. He set up the experiment in order to prove that man was the sum of his experiences and his stimulations which penetrated into the conscious and the unconscious. As a result, he realized that conditioning could be applied to explain human behavior, because the subject of human psychology was only the behavior of human beings. For example, a child was traveling in a car over a dilapidated bridge, his father made jokes about the bridge collapsing, and everyone fell into the river below. The father found it funny so he decided to do it every time they crossed the bridge. Years later, the child has grown up and is now afraid of crossing a bridge in a car. We are convinced that the most natural phenomena can be understood, quantified, predicted and ultimately controlled. The scientific revolution stopped 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 predict and stop economic crises or lack of control over wars and battles. If we were asked to predict phenomena, we would think we should know the most about them. As a result, today we can know more about Jupiter than about the person next to us. However, between our ability to explore human behavior and to study electrons in bacteria, there are fundamental differences, because bacteria don't get upset when we put them under the microscope..