In fact, I was just reading about Algorithmic “Solmonoff” Probability which combines the law of parsimony and algorithmic information theory to give a reasonable basis to the idea of “a priori” probability.

One can consider a hypothesis to be compatible with a set of minimal universal (prefix) Turing machine programs that produce outputs in agreement with the hypothesis given an arbitrary input. All else being equal you then say that the a priori probability one of those Turing machines is actually correct is 1 / ( 2 ^ len(p) ) where len(p) is the bit length of one of the compatible, minimal length programs, and thus the a priori probability of the hypothesis as a sum of such expressions over all hypothesis-compatible Turing machine programs. Pretty neat stuff.

I’m not sure why one shouldn’t just multiply entities but still that’s a good call I overlooked.

If that was not some sort of negative spiritual influence, I can’t imagine what would be. My point is that short of multiplying media unnecessarily is seem rather likely that any medium can be exercised for both good and evil. Are we to posit a second spatiotemporal substrate for the transmission of negative spiritual influences? Or does evil (in whatever form) have one arm tied behind its metaphysical back?

“Attributes can be made manifest only though an organized personage. All attributes are couched in and are the results of organized existence” (JD 10:192)

Ihis statement is not quite consistent. The phrase “made manifest” implies that attributes have a logical or conceptual existence prior to physical realization. The idea of a “real similarity” is critical to the philosophy of Ockham for example.

“Are the results of” on the other hand sounds rather anti-realist, however, in the same manner as belief in ex nihilo creation. I just don’t think someone can invent the number three, or “justice” for that matter. I would say that any attribute (however conceptual) that cannot be expressed in terms of fundamental self existent realities is meaningless.

The reason why is that it seems highly unlikely that there is any medium that is intrinisically good, only capable of being used for good purposes, or is a one way medium with access restricted to divinely authorized agencies. It invests a medium with character that all evidence suggests it doesn’t have. The First Vision comes to mind.

a) what makes communication possible
b) what makes the good possible (which is slightly different from the question you ask)
c) are intelligences the same and if so in what sense
d) is there an infinite regress
e) what enables God to be God

Now (d) is the most controversial and originally I was going delve into that first since that’s more or less the order you engage with them in your third volume. Instead I think asking the more fundamental questions is more useful. It’s a more Heideggarian approach of asking what makes something possible.

As you may know some Evangelical and even Catholic critics suggest that despite the LDS tendency to see the apostasy as due to Greek thought our own problem is that we are two Greek. That is the questions of ultimate existence are not asked but merely swept under the rug. In effect we end up like a gnostic approach where the ultimate God remains hidden and we only worry about and worship the demiurge.

Now I don’t think that fair yet in an other sense there’s something to it. We posit intelligences (whatever they are) without asking about the question of being itself. While I think the traditional Trinitarian way of approaching the question is wrong that’s primarily because of what creation ex nihilo introduces. But the question of the ousia remains largely unthought in Mormonism. I’m not saying we have to think it in the way most Trinitarians did. And there is a sense in which the traditional Mormon critique of the Trinity is correct. Trinitarians aren’t treating the substance as a substance the way Mormons assert. Yet in an other sense they usually are guilty of the onto-theological approach that has largely ruled philosophy since at least Aristotle of conceiving of ousia metaphysically. That is as an entity. And as an entity even if it isn’t a traditional substance it is still a substance. Now this is not essential for thinking the Trinity. (And is partially why Heidegger found such a good reception among many Christian theologians) But to the degree the ground of God is a reasonable question the question must be asked.

Now the critique I mentioned by the Catholic and Evangelicals that I think is quite good is whether the ultimate ground, which we “deny” as essentially related to God is just the ground of the universe itself. That is if intelligences are co-eternal with God, uncreated, and ungrounded, then it seems all divine beings whether in their actualized state or as “gods in embryo” share a common essence that makes their divine nature possible.

How to deal with this?

I want to address this with the question of the spirit and first call into question the physicalist interpretation of spirit (as found in Pratt, Widstoe and frankly many more), then take up the metaphysical question and finally engage with the more ontological question (in the Heideggarian sense of the term)

To the extent the universal intelligence is not merely an attribute or property of the persons, it would seem to have its own existence as a divine sort of “mind” though perhaps not personal. However, unless the mind supervenes on the persons or somehow emerges from their relationship, that would give us at least a quaternity in the Godhead and — I agree with you — that view is really weird.

The view that I think makes most sense of “Intelligence” as it is discussed in the scriptures is that it is the shared mind, energy and glory of the divine persons. It supervenes on them or emerges from them as a unity of truly distinct persons. That view makes the persons once again the bearer of properties though to the extent intelligence/glory/light is emergent, it could have a causal influence and reality that can be described as distinct from their own personal identity but not apart from them. What is emergent is dependent on the base from which it emerges analogous to the way mind is thought to be dependent on the underlying material base in mind-body emergence.