metonymy4u

The questions, “why did you do X” or “why didn’t you do Y,” are quite confusing to me. BF Skinner discovered in 1947 that behavior can be shaped by arbitrarily presented rewards. Whatever behavior happened to be occurring just prior to the reward gets reinforced and becomes a more prominent part of one’s behavioral repertoire. So I wonder how much of “personality” is in fact a product of accident? In this context, why questions no longer seem useful to me. Because there is no reason. Meaning is an accident. Not that it can’t still be beautiful. Just that it has no more ground beneath it.