Okay, can you just state clearly whether you one-box or two-box, and whether you smoke or not-smoke in the smoking lesion problem, so that I understand what your position is, before trying to understand why it is?
I take the one box in Newcomb, and I do not smoke in the smoking lesion.
My position is that they are the same problem. The million is already there or it is not, and the lesion is there or it is not. I cannot change that in either case. But I still make a real decision, one that will be correlated with the outcome, and I choose the winning one.
You're given the option to torture everyone in the universe, or inflict a dust speck on everyone in the universe. Either you are the only one in the universe, or there are 3^^^3 perfect copies of you (far enough apart that you will never meet.) In the latter case, all copies of you are chosen, and all make the same choice. (Edit: if they choose specks, each person gets one dust speck. This was not meant to be ambiguous.)
As it happens, a perfect and truthful predictor has declared that you will choose torture iff you are alone.
What do you do?
How does your answer change if the predictor made the copies of you conditional on their prediction?
How does your answer change if, in addition to that, you're told you are the original?