Hm. I might agree with this and I might not, depending on just what you mean.

Simpler example... consider a deterministic chess-playing algorythm that works by brute-force lookahead of possible moves (I realize that real-world chess programs don't really work this way; that's beside my point). There's a (largely metaphorical) sense in which we can say that it pretends to choose among thousands of different moves, even though in fact there was only ever one move its algorithm was ever going to make given that board condition. But it would be a mistake to take literally the connotations of "pretend" in that case, of social image setting and/or self-deception; the chess program does not pretend anything in that sense.

To say that we pretend to choose among possible actions is to use "pretend" in roughly the same way.

If that's consistent with what you're saying, then I'm merely furiously agreeing with you at great length.