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Many years have passed and I have not worked as a psychologist for the last fifteen years, but I must say that the time I spent in college strongly shaped my understanding of the human world. In the faculty there were several factions of professors, but the strongest without any doubt was experimental psychology, and the content on learning and behavior in our degree curriculum was of utmost importance. The five years I spent studying there were quite a journey, and while there are many topics, authors and texts that have fallen into the oblivion pit of my memory, I think of Skinner every day.
My wife is a "real" psychologist (very talented, with dozens of cases and thousands of therapy sessions behind her), and she also carries the laws of reinforcement as a banner in her daily life. Now that we are parents, we realize how difficult it is to offer consistent and systematic reinforcers for certain behaviors, because the feelings that must be managed to connect with your child, are a bond that sometimes must be cultivated a little "out of the (Skinner) box".
The model of humans as a "black box" is very useful, and its validity goes far beyond what we tend to believe. My ideas about the non-existence of free will, at the same time, reinforce in me the certainty that "when humanity realizes its pure mechanicity, only Skinner's psychology and radical behaviorism will be left". And yes, I know it sounds presumptuous to use the word "certainty" instead of "faith," but it is something I see with great clarity: belief in free will is the ultimate barrier we have to break down as a species. Humans took an important step in deciphering their kinship with our animal brethren. Now it remains for us to be even more humble, and to accept that we are only links in a chain. We have no more freedom than a falling stone, a water molecule that changes its structure, or a star that is born. The hundreds of millions of variables that may exist to explain human behavior are clearly immeasurable and beyond our comprehension, but that does not imply the existence of something magical in us that detaches us from the snowball that the universe is.
I watch my son playing and laughing, and I enjoy the abstraction of the world that our consciousness offers us. We have to live as people, and that implies expecting anything from this chaotic world in which we exist.