If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I woudl feel trapped.

fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.

It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.

I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.

If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse - a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.

I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.

Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.