Is free-will an illusion?

con·scious·ness
ˈkän(t)SHəsnəs/
noun
the awareness or perception of something by a person.
plural noun: consciousnesses
"her acute consciousness of Mike's presence"

trying to explain our overt behavior by appealing to inner states of mind, feelings, and other elements of an “autonomous man” inside our skulls was utterly foolish, unscientific, and a waste of time. “The ease with which mentalistic explanations can be invented on the spot is perhaps the best gauge of how little attention we should pay to them” (Skinner 1971: 160).

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/feeling-our-way/201401/consciousness-explained

Behaviorism is nothing but an outdated model to me

That article is so simplistic that it's pitiful.

When the thing explained is you or something you care about, a simple explanation can irritate.

RADICAL BEHAVIORISM The statement that behaviorists deny the existence of feelings, sensations,ideas, and other features of mental life needs a good deal of clarification. Methodological behaviorism and some versions of logical positivism ruled private events out of bounds because there could be no public agreement about theirvalidity. Introspection could not be accepted as a scientific practice, and thepsychology of people like Wilhelm Wundt and Edward B. Titchener was attackedaccordingly. Radical behaviorism, however, takes a different line. It does not deny the possibility of self-observation or self-knowledge or its possible usefulness, but it questions the nature of what is felt or observed and hence known. It restores introspection but not what philosophers and introspective psychologists had believed they were "specting," Mentalism kept attention away from the external antecedent events which might have explained behavior, by seeming to supply an alternative explanation. ...Radical behaviorism restores some kind of balance. It does not insist upon truth by agreement and can therefore consider events taking place in the private world within the skin. It does not call these events unobservable, and it does not dismiss them as subjective. It simply questions the nature of the object observed and the reliability of the observations. The position can be stated as follows: what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind, or mental life but the observer's own body. This does not mean, as I shall show later, that introspection is a kind of physiological research, nor does it mean (and this is the heart of the argument) that what are felt or introspectively observed are the causes of behavior. An organism behaves as it does because of its current structure, but most of this is out of reach of introspection. At the moment we must content ourselves, as the methodological behaviorist insists, with a person's genetic and environmental histories. What are introspectively observed are certain collateral products of those histories. . . . Our increasing knowledge of the control exerted by the environment makes it possible to examine the effect of the world within the skin and the nature of self-knowledge. It also makes it possible to interpret a wide range of mentalistic expressions. For example, we can look at those features of behavior which have led people to speak of an act of will, of a sense of purpose, of experience as distinct from reality, of innate or acquired ideas, of memories, meanings, and the personal knowledge of the scientist, and of hundreds of other mentalistic things or events. Some can be "translated into behavior," others discarded as unnecessary or meaningless. In this way we repair the major damage wrought by mentalism. When what a person does is attributed to what is going on inside him, investigation is brought to an end. Why explain the explanation? For twenty-five hundred years people have been preoccupied with feelings and mental life, but only recently has any interest been shown in a more precise analysis of the role of the environment. Ignorance of that role led in the first place to mental fictions, and it has been perpetuated by the explanatory practices to which they gave rise

I've never blamed autistic children, nor addicts

What would really be startling and, in turn, would make me question my scientific worldview would be if the mind were capable of doing even one thing that the senses can’t.

That's a non sequitur. I never said autism or addiction were inherently wrong, that people should be blamed for them...

if the most courageous thing you can say about your assessment is "maybe I was wrong"

If you no longer blame the child for choosing autism

1. That science as a whole is but a collection of thoughts, ideas, mental representations, and therefore that if our thoughts are irrelevant, then it follows that science (including behaviorism) is irrelevant.