No - you are unable to do this. It's roughly along the same lines of a button in it's pressed state when a user clicks it - an 'interim' operation for the user to set a value. You could focus
to it, but that's about it.
If you really wanted to simulate this, you could play with some CSS. For example, you could create a list that looks like the dropdown list and set the dropdown value based on whatever the user clicks - similar to how an autocomplete list looks.
You could always change it to a multiple line list box if you wanted to display all the values to the user. You'd do this by setting the size
to any value and back to 1 when you want to hide. It's not perfect, but it's another option:
$("#open").click(function(e){
e.preventDefault();
$("#myselect").attr("size",5);
});
$("#myselect").click(function(){
$(this).attr("size",1);
});
http://jsfiddle.net/jonathon/cr25U/