These sort of discussions are based on If/Then reasoning. Obviously if you reject the “If” then there is no reason to spend much time on the “Then”. In other words if you reject the premise there is no need to discuss the various implications of that premise.

In such cases where you reject the premise of the discussion your time is better spent reading and commenting elsewhere.

Where is your rationalization applied to the “authority” of Joseph Smith?…how dare we question that one – as it is “rational” to believe that if we pray to get a “feeling” (burning) that it must be so… how rational is that?? Our feelings couldn’t possibly be wrong, could they? How dare we question such tradition, as held by our fathers? Like questioning the Pope. How dare we get rational?

-BHodges

I remind you of the minimal definition of rational we are using in this conversation. I mentioned it back in comment #28 and limit it simply to being a wish to avoid misery. So choosing anything that avoids misery is “perfectly rational”.

Geoff assumes in the OP that we are “eternally rational”. And the assumption about having enough information is a big one

No it isn’t a big assumption. It assumes we are conscious and have a certain irreducible level of intelligence and it assumes we use those two to avoid prolonged misery. That is no stretch at all in my opinion.

This sort of thinking also assumes that all knowledge is possessed by all intelligences.

Not at all. It simply assumes that spirits interact with each other rather than existing in completely isolated vacuums. Through interaction we would figure out what leads to misery and what leads to happiness given enough time. And if we have existed an infinite amount of time already that is clearly “enough time”.

To All- I just noticed I mislabeled some of my points the second “4″ in post 125 should really be 5.

From Comment 3: “the problem is that if we assume… that no spirit has more rational capacity or free will or time than another spirit then the idea that it might take some spirit another trillion years of thumb-twiddling to figure out that wickedness never was happiness simply doesn’t make any sense” This sort of thinking also assumes that all knowledge is possessed by all intelligences.

I agree the output of a rational decision is based on the input of knowledge. This is why I included in my response that the intelligence has enough information to make a rational choice. That is the intelligence has enough information to rationally choose Mormonism as the path to union over other competing paths.

“Thinking about a curve of decision-making is odd. In order for that curve to approach that asymptote, you’re talking about over time somebody either a) becoming more or less rational or b)gaining more or less knowledge.”

Well the reason I choose this example. Is I do not believe we are perfectly rational beings. In other words we are not emotionless thinking machines. But to some extent our decisions may be influenced by irrantional factors. For example maybe I was offended by person B so I leave religion A. Clearly being offended by a member of a given religion is not necessarily a rational reason to think the given religion is not true. So I think of the decision making curve as in a sense very “noisy” we may stray far from what is really best for us. But if at the core we are more or less rational beings eventually we will all converge at that which benefits us the most. Again assuming we have enough information such that we know (or strongly suspect) what is best for

To be honest, I don’t think I really know what ‘concurrent’ means in terms of infinite time.