Anyway, there’s a larger implication in Yudkowsky’s line of thought. The central perversity of Timeless Decision Theory is that it replaces the illusion of free will with the illusion of the Predictor’s constant companionship. But the way that Yudkowsky can make this surprise conflation of individual consciousness and the alien brain parasite that will be riding within it for all time is through the idea of predicting someone else’s actions. Indeed, the act of prediction would seem to be central to the whole idea of dual consciousness. To be dually conscious is to endlessly predict the
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