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TheOtherDave comments on My summary of Eliezer's position on free will - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm staying out of the EY-exegesis side of this altogether, but a note on your summary in its own voice...
I would say, rather, that the process of imagining different outcomes and selecting one simply is the experience that we treat as the belief that we can choose different things. Or, to put it another way: I don't think we're highly motivated to pretend we could have done something different, so much as we are easily confused about whether we could have or not.
What I was clumsily alluding to there is how we're computing the counterfactual. If we have a (deterministic) decision-making algorithm, it will only ever output one value in a particular situation. However, we have to pretend that it could, so that we can evaluate the outcome of our different actions.
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.