Nicely said.

My resolution to the question of free will and determinism followed the same lines of thought. The analogy I employ is to imagine a playground that is bordered with a fence and carries certain rules to abide by. You can do whatever you like (free will) within the playground as long as the rules are being followed (determinism /survival mechanisms).

In that analogy, I consider rules to be constants, like physics, gravity, hunger, sleep, etc. It helped resolved the free will / determinism argument for me.