Conflicted by the Duggars for years

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Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Tsavo » Tue Jun 19, 2018 12:29 pm

I find the Duggars fascinating.

While I reel in horror over the thought of having been born into that family, I don't think they are necessarily suffering. While I think it is criminal of the parents to not teach their kids free thought and encourage them to go to college and grad school, I think the kids seem happy. Once they get married I note a number of the girls relax the strict dress code so that's good. They are not so programmed that they can't think for themselves later.

I felt very bad for the girls when the Josh thing became public. They were victimized twice.

My favorite Duggar kids are Jill and Jordyn. :-)

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby DJR » Tue Jun 19, 2018 1:43 pm

How do you even keep up with their comings & goings? Do they still have a tv show?
formerly known as "Deanna" on UDBB -- and prior to that, as "DJD".

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby WheresMyWhite » Tue Jun 19, 2018 3:12 pm

I don't believe the Duggar parents have a show any longer but some of the offspring do.

I just can't bring myself to watch that show. Watched the parent show once and that was more than enough for me.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Tarlo Farm » Tue Jun 19, 2018 4:59 pm

No confliction for me - I find them icky.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby khall » Tue Jun 19, 2018 6:19 pm

Not my cup of tea either, ick.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby piedmontfields » Fri Jun 22, 2018 4:25 pm

Who are the Duggars?

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Koolkat » Fri Jun 22, 2018 5:08 pm

piedmontfields wrote:Who are the Duggars?


:lol: I had to google it.

Moving on. . .

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Bip » Fri Jun 22, 2018 11:50 pm

Koolkat wrote:
piedmontfields wrote:Who are the Duggars?


:lol: I had to google it.

Moving on. . .


I envy you! And I envy the poster above you even more because that person still doesn’t know.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby piedmontfields » Sat Jun 23, 2018 12:51 am

I google a lot of stuff everyday, but frankly most of it is physics-related!! (or politics, but not going there here)

I'm sensing that living "Duggar-Free" is a fine zone. :-0

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Tsavo » Sat Jun 23, 2018 1:16 am

The Duggars are in the Quiverfull movement though neither parent was in that growing up. They will have as many kids as possible. There is an entire subculture running around loose in the country of these people and they all home school. They get together once a year at their home schooling conference to see if there is any more science they need to deny. LOL

They tend to marry within the culture though not always. The Duggar kids seem very nice and have traveled all over the world for the TV show and for mission trips.

It's just so limited and causes problems... Jill became a midwife but it is in no way an actual midwifery degree which is essentially a Masters in Nursing. She never went to college because none of the kids are allowed to do that. What is she supposed to do? There is literally no way to become a real midwife so she got the only certification she could. That whole episode where people were criticizing her for not having a real midwife degree made me very sad. The parents are such tools of their religion that they limit their kids so much.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby kande50 » Sat Jun 23, 2018 3:42 pm

Tsavo wrote:The parents are such tools of their religion that they limit their kids so much.


Speaking of limiting, I know parents who refuse to let some of their kids go to better schools, or take advantage of their spouse's much better health insurance plans, because they don't want any of their kids to have any advantages over their other kids.

I'd like to explain genetics to some of them, but it would be a waste of time.
Last edited by kande50 on Sat Jun 23, 2018 3:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Rockabilly » Sat Jun 23, 2018 3:45 pm

I'm fascinated by them like a moth to a flame, but the thing I never got and still don't is Anna staying with Josh after all he did........well, I still don't have words for it all, but staying with him I still don't get.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Tsavo » Sat Jun 23, 2018 3:53 pm

Rockabilly wrote:I'm fascinated by them like a moth to a flame, but the thing I never got and still don't is Anna staying with Josh after all he did........well, I still don't have words for it all, but staying with him I still don't get.


Divorce is so frowned upon that I don't think she would have done it although I hope she considered it. Then she went on to have a fifth child with him. That whole thing is another sad problem... clearly Josh's brain doesn't do faith like the rest of them yet he had no way out. His childhood transgressions should have been dealt with by trained psychiatrists, not super-genius church people. His cheating on Anna was just a manifestation that he didn't really want to be married and have so many children at a young age but that option wasn't open to him. I notice John-David is taking that option maybe after seeing what happened to Josh.

I just think that their incredibly cloying religion has caused many problems although I can't judge the kids. I can judge the parents. If they want to be like that then fine but don't force your kids into the life.
Last edited by Tsavo on Sat Jun 23, 2018 4:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby kande50 » Sat Jun 23, 2018 4:05 pm

Tsavo wrote: I can judge the parents. If they want to be like that then fine but don't force your kids into the life.


Maybe it was "forced" onto the parents by their parents, so you can't really blame them, either? Some adults are able to reject at least some of what they learned as children, and others aren't.

I've also been considering DNA and environment, and whether anyone really does have any free will to accept or reject anything? Maybe given the Duggers' genetics they've all made the only decisions they could have made given the environments they were in?

It's also possible that the environment they're in is the best environment they could be in.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Tsavo » Sat Jun 23, 2018 4:27 pm

The parent were not raised like that.

There is no contra-causal free will.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby acheyarcher » Sat Jun 23, 2018 11:36 pm

their genetics??? Are you saying religiosity is genetic

otherwise the parents made the decision to live this life and the children have had it foisted upon them. none of it genetic

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby kande50 » Sun Jun 24, 2018 9:28 am

acheyarcher wrote:their genetics??? Are you saying religiosity is genetic

otherwise the parents made the decision to live this life and the children have had it foisted upon them. none of it genetic


What I'm saying is that there may be no such thing as free will, and the decisions people make are already predetermined by the way their genetics interact with their environment. When I first heard that theory I rejected it immediately, but the more I think about it the more it explains why some continue to make such self destructive decisions over and over again.

Not that getting stuck in a particular lifestyle that others think is self destructive necessarily is, but there are certainly lifestyles that are not only self destructive, but damaging to others, too.

What I find so interesting about it is that if the theory is true, then individuals can't even make the decision to change their environment, because whether they do that or not depends on how their current environment interacts with their genetic makeup.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Literiding » Sun Jun 24, 2018 3:53 pm

kande50 wrote:What I'm saying is that there may be no such thing as free will, and the decisions people make are already predetermined by the way their genetics interact with their environment. When I first heard that theory I rejected it immediately, but the more I think about it the more it explains why some continue to make such self destructive decisions over and over again.

Not that getting stuck in a particular lifestyle that others think is self destructive necessarily is, but there are certainly lifestyles that are not only self destructive, but damaging to others, too.

What I find so interesting about it is that if the theory is true, then individuals can't even make the decision to change their environment, because whether they do that or not depends on how their current environment interacts with their genetic makeup.


I rejected the concept that there is no free will, partly because I’m a humanist and I firmly believe everyones’ opinion counts. But the ugly part of free will is that not everyone agrees on problems, solutions, or courses of action. Good leadership is the ability to offer an opinion and/or option that most of the people involved agree to follow.

The concept that there is no free will is often advanced by those who believe in “noblesse oblige**” as a justification to manage the lives of others. If there is no free will, by definition, there can be no crime nor sin (in the social sense such as bulling or mean behavior). So as a result, there can be no accountability for a subject’s inappropriate actions and “SOMEONE” must manage and take care of them. But I’ve never seen a complete logical train to complete the thought how SOMEONE takes care of everyone else if there is no free will at some level. It’s sort of implied that a person in authority has by definition, “better instincts.”

If one can only respond as determined by genetics interacting with the environment, the behavior is instinctual. Instinct is wonderful and gives a living being a repertory of responses to situations that have not been experienced before. But almost all creatures, great and small, have the behavioral tools to evaluate and judge whether instinctual responses are inappropriate to a given situation and can modify their behavior for a “better” outcome, the bases for “behavior modification” in training.

Since I rejected the lack of free will, I had to come up with a definition of free will and I decided after some thought that free will is “the pursuit of happiness.” Organisms can reject the current situation they are living in and move to an environment that is more pleasing, whether that is a better Ph in the environmental surroundings or better social interactions. I’ve known several cats that have changed owners as a result of their decision to live somewhere else rather than the decision of the human filling the food bowl. People have left dominating cults because they were “unhappy” with the life in the cult.

The tough part of this definition is what is happiness? In some cases happiness can be quite negative in the view of an observer. But the subject is free to choose the “correct” or “incorrect” choice and some underlying motivation causes the less correct decision to be made. People living in cults get a great deal of emotional support and social "belonging" that isn't as intense as living outside the cult. To reject that support and sense of belonging takes a great deal of self confidence. The easy path is to remain within the cult. Subjects don’t always choose based on “best interest” and I can’t offer any explanation why. Sadomasochistic behaviors make absolutely no sense to me but people willingly engage in them. Instinct almost always offers a behavior that minimizes pain and/or damage, yet some psychological need drives them to repeat and repeat those sadomasochistic behaviors. Substance abuse is of the same nature, counter productive behavior that emphases short term happiness over long term social approved happiness. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to several sociologists about people incarcerated for various legal reasons. In almost all cases, there is a defect in the subject’s decision making process emphasizing short term happiness over long term happiness. And of course there is the underlying thought that incarceration makes a subject unhappy enough to avoid it in the future — an assumption that I’ve very rarely found true.

So it’s not a lack of free will that drives negative behavior, but poor decision making ability. Sometimes caused by lack of understanding, other times by the inability to “see” the problem, and yet other times by being perverse makes a subject happy.


(**-There are several definitions for “noblesse oblige” on the Internet, this is the one I’m using: “the inferred responsibility of privileged people to act with generosity and nobility toward those less privileged: there was to being a celebrity a certain element of noblesse oblige.”)

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Tsavo » Sun Jun 24, 2018 4:57 pm

Just as you don't hold accountable a person who commits crimes due to a brain tumor, you can't hold them responsible if they do those things in response to what their brain is telling them. You are not the author of your thoughts and cannot in fact identify why something occurs to you.

There is still good, happiness, etc. It is the success over time of brains (then downstream the conscious mind) picking choices and perhaps learning or at least suffering the consequences of making the wrong choices that results in out society of laws. Here is an example... so while we still have people who want to let's say withhold medical treatments from their children due to their brains telling their minds to do that, enough other people in society have brains that have informed minds to have laws protecting these children. Not in every state but we will get there.

Whatever it may seem to people, they are not the authors of their thoughts and it is only the slow evolution of brains in society that results in more happiness. The people with brains that don't lead their minds to happiness and say lead them to commit crimes need to be taken out of society for the protection of society but certainly not for punishment.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Tsavo » Mon Jun 25, 2018 10:46 am

Fresh research on the brain doing stuff that later manifests as consciousness. The brain does something one to two seconds before the person is aware of which of two images it resolves. Since none of this brain activity was noticeable by the subject, it couldn't have been authored by the subject. it is in the category of again disproving contra-causal free will.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03749-0

Human single neuron activity precedes emergence of conscious perception
Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv, Liad Mudrik, Michael R. Hill, Christof Koch & Itzhak Fried
Nature Communicationsvolume 9, Article number: 2057 (2018) | Download Citation

Abstract
Identifying the neuronal basis of spontaneous changes in conscious experience in the absence of changes in the external environment is a major challenge. Binocular rivalry, in which two stationary monocular images lead to continuously changing perception, provides a unique opportunity to address this issue. We studied the activity of human single neurons in the medial temporal and frontal lobes while patients were engaged in binocular rivalry. Here we report that internal changes in the content of perception are signaled by very early (~-2000 ms) nonselective medial frontal activity, followed by selective activity of medial temporal lobe neurons that precedes the perceptual change by ~1000 ms. Such early activations are not found for externally driven perceptual changes. These results suggest that a medial fronto-temporal network may be involved in the preconscious internal generation of perceptual transitions.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Ponichiwa » Mon Jun 25, 2018 1:27 pm

kande50 wrote:It's also possible that the environment they're in is the best environment they could be in.


Paging Dr. Pangloss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Literiding » Mon Jun 25, 2018 6:22 pm

Tsavo wrote:Fresh research on the brain doing stuff that later manifests as consciousness. The brain does something one to two seconds before the person is aware of which of two images it resolves. Since none of this brain activity was noticeable by the subject, it couldn't have been authored by the subject. it is in the category of again disproving contra-causal free will.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03749-0


The linked article has nothing to do with the topic of discussion. It is an investigation of the visual image processing part of the brain where normal time lags allow us to see many sequentially viewed images (TV or a movie projector) as a continuous moving image that we can perceive as a horse jumping a fence and not a colorful group of colored pixels. It was fairly complex in presenting conflicting images to either eye and watching how long it took the brain to sort it out. The study did not address how the consciousness (mind) used the perceptions. Given that the nine subjects were “pharmacologically intractable epilepsy patients implanted with intracranial depth electrodes to localize the focus of seizure onset . . . “ makes the use of the very narrow conclusions very difficult for making generalizations without some additional study. Epilepsy can be thought of as a disabling mistiming of internal cerebral communications so the assumption the conclusions apply to others outside the study is just that, an assumption.

At the risk of exposing my lack of competence to interpret the article, the above study might be re-imagined as looking at a window and seeing a shadow and realizing it’s a butterfly. The article did not explore how the mind converted the image to a concept although based on timings, the authors could draw some inferences as too how long it took to happen. Nor did the study examine the follow-on steps that would of more interest in this discussion such as realizing the reason we can see the shadow on the glass is because the glass is dirty and needs to be cleaned. The part of the cerebral process that is cogent to this discussion is how the individual decides to defer washing the window to ride their horse.

The crux of our disagreement is that I believe that thoughts can be independent to a greater or lesser degree of the tissue they reside in/on. Having been an IT manager in a legal environment, I had the hardest time convincing the paralegal staff that facts, ideas, directions, and judgements could be independent from the piece of paper it was printed on. Same here, the brain is the place it done, but may only be the vessel of the thoughts. I acknowledge that damaged/defective tissue can affect the thought process, but the current legal system (accountability for one’s actions) has in place protocols to make allowances for those with a diminished capacity to exercise free will. Competency hearings are conducted if there is doubt and at the end of the adjudication process, there is the “Innocent by reason of insanity,” to prevent those without free will from being held accountable for that they cannot be responsible for. But those with defective brain tissue and unable to exercise free will are in the minority, in the “typical” bell shaped curve of human cerebral function, the legal system as is can handle 95% of the U.S. population or more without resorting to the special protocols for those with diminished free will.

Even though your thesis about thought almost mandates differing solutions based on differing environments, your inability to accept that my opinion differs from yours, I would say that your position is more one of ideology than of attempting to understand “how it all works.” Further discourse, IMHO, is probably not productive. There is a cute little prayer, Serenity Prayer, that covers my position regarding further discussion (posts) but you may be offended by the reference to God. So I’ll give you another take on my thoughts by the late science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein:

http://thinkexist.com/quotation/never_t ... 18581.html

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Tsavo » Mon Jun 25, 2018 6:44 pm

Literiding wrote:The crux of our disagreement is that I believe that thoughts can be independent to a greater or lesser degree of the tissue they reside in/on.


It sounds like you are arguing for dualism which no researcher in this area accepts as far as I know.

So I’ll give you another take on my thoughts by the late science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein:

http://thinkexist.com/quotation/never_t ... 18581.html


This is in keeping with the bitterness associated with dualism being dismissed and people not liking that. Science is the only game in town.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Koolkat » Mon Jun 25, 2018 7:08 pm

Literiding wrote:The concept that there is no free will is often advanced by those who believe in “noblesse oblige**” as a justification to manage the lives of others. If there is no free will, by definition, there can be no crime nor sin (in the social sense such as bulling or mean behavior). So as a result, there can be no accountability for a subject’s inappropriate actions and “SOMEONE” must manage and take care of them. But I’ve never seen a complete logical train to complete the thought how SOMEONE takes care of everyone else if there is no free will at some level. It’s sort of implied that a person in authority has by definition, “better instincts.”

(**-There are several definitions for “noblesse oblige” on the Internet, this is the one I’m using: “the inferred responsibility of privileged people to act with generosity and nobility toward those less privileged: there was to being a celebrity a certain element of noblesse oblige.”)



Speaking of ideology. . .

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Tsavo » Mon Jun 25, 2018 7:48 pm

Yes. The concept that there is no contracausal free will is advanced because all the science is consistent with there being no contracausal free will, not for any imaginary reason as was proffered.

Researchers accept this. Lay people who rely on the concept of free will to power their ethics, not so much.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Literiding » Tue Jun 26, 2018 1:45 pm

Normally, when I’m done with a subject, I’m done and have no compulsion to have the last word. But this morning while going through my online science reading list, I found this article on the Scientific American site. It is too compelling not to add to the discussion. So at the risk of pouring gasoline on the fire:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... l-and-god/


For millennia, the greatest minds of our species have grappled to gain purchase on the vertiginous ontological cliffs of three great mysteries—consciousness, free will and God—without ascending anywhere near the thin air of their peaks. Unlike other inscrutable problems, such as the structure of the atom, the molecular basis of replication and the causes of human violence, which have witnessed stunning advancements of enlightenment, these three seem to recede ever further away from understanding, even as we race ever faster to catch them in our scientific nets.

{snip - additional information}

Free will. Few scientists dispute that we live in a deterministic universe in which all effects have causes (except in quantum mechanics, although this just adds an element of randomness to the system, not freedom). And yet we all act as if we have free will—that we make choices among options and retain certain degrees of freedom within constraining systems. Either we are all delusional, or else the problem is framed to be conceptually impenetrable. We are not inert blobs of matter bandied about the pinball machine of life by the paddles of nature's laws; we are active agents within the causal net of the universe, both determined by it and helping to determine it through our choices. That is the compatibilist position from whence volition and culpability emerge.



Author - Michael Shermer
Publisher of Skeptic magazine
Presidential Fellow at Chapman University
Author of Heaven on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia (Henry Holt, 2018)


Since this is written in the first person subjective point of view, it is an opinion and feel free to disagree — with references.

For those who are interested in a survey of academic thought on the subjects of “consciousness” and “free will,” here are the Wikipedia entries on those subjects. While Wikipedia is not quotable for academic writing, I find it acceptable for bulletin board discussions. Sometimes, one gets interesting insights by reading the “Talk” tab on the article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

(Edited on 06/27/18 to add information important to this thread that would be unavailable if/when the linked article is put behind a "Paywall")
Last edited by Literiding on Wed Jun 27, 2018 1:23 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby demi » Tue Jun 26, 2018 6:37 pm

No time to read the article you cited ATM, but the quote is very interesting, even more so since it’s from SA. Thanks for posting.

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Re: Conflicted by the Duggars for years

Postby Tsavo » Tue Jul 03, 2018 11:36 pm

The need for religion appears to be biologically based. Michelle did not grow up in a particularly religious household but was drawn to being a Stepford wife. A more famous example of someone not raised with religion but who searched his whole life for spirituality and finally found it was Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam). Another very famous example is NIH chief Francis Collins.

At the other end of the spectrum are people born into religion and who lived devoutly for years but yet simply cannot bring themselves to believe. This list includes Bart Ehrman (UNC Professor) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Also my father who at he age of about 9 and growing up is a very devout Catholic family realized he simply couldn't believe and was a lifelong atheist. My mother was not raised with any religion. Us kids were biologically most likely to not be able to believe and that is the case.

It's all brain science. The rest is commentary.


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