Carson said the following at Thursday’s debate, and Walker could be seen alongside him, nodding vigorously (I couldn’t see the other candidates, so I don’t know if others did as well):
I would have thought these devoutly religious conservatives would be mind-body dualists for sure. 
I think you’re reading more into it than Carson intended.
The inference seems very clear and inescapable, whatever he “intended”.
Carson is a duallist, but not in the sense that you think. He’s a duallist in that he believes in two contradictory things at once. Carson is a devout Adventist. He believes in the human soul. He also believes the consciousness derives from the brain. He believes both of these things at once, depending on the situation. Doesn’t really make a whole lot of intellectual sense, but religion usually doesn’t.
BTW, I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed just how much in love Scott Walker seemed to be with Carson. The way he was looking at him I was sure that Walker is voting for Carson, not himself, in the Wisconsin primary.
Yeah, I think you nailed it.
What’s contradictory about believing in a soul and believing that that consciousness derives from the brain? I can think of plenty of ways that isn’t a problem; non-conscious souls, imprinting souls, imprinting brains, a soul-mind separation… I mean, you have to* add* something to that situation before you get a contradiction.
Yes. Every brand of classic Christianity confesses the resurrection of the flesh, because the complete human is body AND mind AND soul. The contradiction arises if we presume the position that only the soul is the “real you”, or that the mind and the soul are one and the same and that the material body is a mere vessel for them. That is not in evidence as the belief of the persons in question.
Aren’t you a Carson fan? I don’t trust your judgment on this.
I’m a big fan of Carson the man(who wouldn’t be?). Carson the candidate, we’ll see. He hasn’t impressed so far, although he’s doing better than his disastrous start.
I thought that the dual idea was more along the lines of the soul working or interfacing through the brain.
I’m sure that’s how they’ve had to retrench it in the modern era. But clearly one does not need a brain to think and be conscious, according to Christianity; otherwise, forget an afterlife. When Carson says he is “operating on the thing that makes them who they are”, I don’t know how to interpret that other than there being no consciousness, no self, without that physical brain.
Why is this so hard?
Let’s start from the fact that the Christian afterlife does not feature disembodied souls. You seem to question that, but I’m not sure there’s a single reference to a body-less afterlife in the New Testament. (And those who have died and have yet to be resurrected are “sleeping” thereby implying that souls need a body to function.)
What if we use a computer analogy? You put data on a hard drive. What is the data, though? Is the hard drive heavier after you put the data into it? Can we store the data without a drive? Or interact with the data without the drive? No… the data is a concept, really. It has no physical existence, but it is recorded via the state of the hard drive. Change the hard drive, change the data. Destroy the hard drive, destroy the data. But if you had a backup of the data, you could put that data into a new hard drive and it would be the same as the original, wouldn’t it?
So there you go. Brain=hard drive. Soul=data.
Or you can just keep beating on your straw man effigy of a Christian.
I’m gonna guess that the vast majority of real-world Christians don’t agree with that.
I’m not saying that’s not what is written. I’m saying that that isn’t how it’s sold to an ignorant populace.
It’s not a straw man, because it’s still the data, not the physical hard drive, that makes that consciousness what it is. The hard drive itself is generic, with no individuality.
Besides which, I know a lot of Christians and I don’t believe most of them expect to spend the afterlife in their physical bodies. I know there is stuff about this in the Bible, that at the time of Jesus’s Second Coming people’s dead bodies will be raised. So a strict version of Christian theology could imagine that one’s experience of dying would be to lose consciousness and then the next conscious experience occurs when everyone is raised at the same time, however many years/centuries/millennia from now it is.
But I guarantee you that the vast majority of actual Christians do not see it this way. When a loved one dies, they think of them as having an afterlife right now, at the same time as everyone here on Earth continues their pre-End Times existence. There is talk of how “Grandpa is looking down and smiling right now–he’s so proud of you”, yadda yadda.
ETA: **Lobohan **said it more succinctly while I was composing my post.
Doing a quick search comes up with this http://relationshipsinamerica.com/religion/do-people-still-believe-in-life-after-death where there is a question about a bodily resurrection near the bottom.
37% of all Americans believe in a bodily resurrection. So if we go into a shopping mall, believers are outnumbered 2:1. I’m not sure I’d call that “vast majority” and that sample is all Americans - so we’re not just sampling Christians.
If you walk into a random church service (not even a Christian church, just anyone attending church), then the belief in a bodily resurrection jumps to 61%. So among Christians who go to church, this is a majority belief.
I would guess that these people’s beliefs are confused, contradictory, and just generally incoherent (shocker!). If you ask them if their dead grandma is looking down on them right now from Heaven, there’s no way 61 percent are saying “nuh uh”.
ETA: You also still haven’t addressed my point that the hard drive itself in your analogy is a blank slate and does not “make someone who they are”.
A bodily resurrection at the end times is in addition to a spiritual heaven, at least in every Christian I’ve ever known.
Interesting implications there. Implication #1 is that since a fetus is, at least at some stage, an empty hard drive with no [experiential] data, then it clearly has no soul and all good Christians must obviously be pro-choice, or at least indifferent about abortion.
Implication #2 is that when we can transfer the entire information content of a human brain into an AI machine – as Ray Kurzweil and others think we will be able to do within a few decades – then such a machine, clearly, will have a soul. So that when the time comes to send it to the scrap yard for recycling, its soul will ascend to the Kingdom of Heaven. Which gives an unintentional whole new meaning to the Tracy Kidder book The Soul of a New Machine, which is actually about the challenges of engineering a new generation of minicomputer.
However, none of this is what I thought this thread was going to be about. I thought it was about how Carson and Walker were both soulless automatons with no human empathy whose only purpose was to dismantle social institutions and enact tax cuts for the rich. To which my question was going to be, why limit that criticism to just those two? 
Some Christian (but very progressive) friends of mine provided me with two Bible citations that appear to rebut **dracoi’s **argument.
2 Corinthians 5:8-9
Luke 16:19-31