I think you're losing focus of the discussion here. Remember, all I've set out to do was to show that a determinist can consistently talk about "choice" because a choice is simply the selection among alternatives. Your thought seemed to be that since the past would only be consistent with one future, given determinism, then there are no alternatives. But there are alternatives, they are just epistemic. In response to this, you are telling me how we ought to talk, but this is a different matter. If you're really interested, I'll answer your questions as well as respond to you saying that I don't really believe it, but I would also like to get to 2, 3, and 4 from your original post I responded to, but one at a time.
IOW: There are no real alternatives - there is one fixed future, BUT we can pretend there ARE alternatives.
You didn't answer address any of these obvious observations:
1. how is it "less emotional"??
2. how could it possibly be "easier to understand" when you are using terms like "alternatives of the choice" which clearly do not actually exist on that world view
3. "Illusion of freely choosing" is exactly what you are claiming, how then could it possibly be "less informative" or have an "emotional slant"
Epistemic =/= not real, so there's no pretending, but there are alternatives. If a weatherman says tomorrow's precipitation could be rain or snow, he's not pretending there are alternatives. The alternatives are epistemic.
not at all.
but we know the weather doesn't "go one way or the other", it's fixed, it's just a question of us not having enough predictive power to understand what it will do.
That's vastly different than thinking that we as humans have alternate choices available to us, and we're selecting from among alternatives.
Your weather analogy is a good one, when was the last time a weatherman said "well, we have four options available to us, we're trying to decide now if we're going with rain or snow". (not predict, but actually cause it to rain or snow)
No
Instead they know it will do one particular thing, they just don't know for sure what that one thing is. There are no alternatives, just degrees with which they believe they know what that one thing actually will be.
That's light years away from the way we look at our ability to decide among alternatives. We aren't going in thinking "well, I know it's going to be one thing, that's for sure, can't change that, but I just want to see how close I can get to figuring out what that one thing will be, at this point in time."
not a human on the planet earth thinks:
"geeze, I wonder if I'm going to pick chocolate or vanilla ice cream for dessert, I know I can't change what it's going to be, there's only one future after all. I just wonder if I can predict what my selection will be."