I tend to believe that abstractions are real things. When I look at a tree, there is something really there—it is not “merely” a collection of atoms. The atoms are arranged as they are because they are part of something larger, something we are able to recognize and have given a name.

At the same time, I believe in the connectedness of all things. And when I look closely at that tree, the boundaries begin to blur. Where does the tree end and the rest of the world begin? Leaves that are part of it fall to the ground—and then they’re not. Roots stretch underground and draw in nutrients. If I zoom in far enough, what seemed like a clear edge dissolves into a gradient.

Many people are uncomfortable with this. We want things to be tidy: inside or outside, true or false, the tree or not the tree. But I find the blurriness clarifying rather than troubling, because the blur at the edges doesn’t threaten what’s obviously true in the middle. Consider day and night. There is no precise moment when one becomes the other—it often happens without our noticing. And yet no one would say that day and night are illusions. At noon it is unambiguously day. At midnight it is unambiguously night. The gradation between them doesn’t erase the reality of either.

The same is true of the self. The more I reflect on who I am, the blurrier the boundary between me and the rest of the world seems to get. I am shaped by genetics, upbringing, relationships, chance. I am not merely my thoughts, nor only my body, nor just an observer or an actor—I seem to be all of these things at once. And yet, like the tree, like the day: I am connected, but I am real.

This is where I think the free will debate tends to go wrong. Philosophers and scientists will point out that we live in a deterministic universe, or that our conscious awareness of a decision often follows the decision itself, and then conclude that free will must be an illusion—that it simply doesn’t exist. But this conclusion only holds if you’ve first quietly discarded any coherent definition of what free will actually is.

Here is mine. “Will” refers to the choices I make and the intentions behind them. “Free” refers to the idea that I am not a mere billiard ball, bouncing around on a path dictated entirely by forces outside myself. On that definition, the standard arguments against free will mostly turn out to be beside the point.

Take the claim that our choices are determined by factors we didn’t choose—our genes, our upbringing, our circumstances. This is probably true. But notice what’s on that list. Your DNA is part of you. Your formative experiences are part of you. Saying “my choices were determined by my genetics and upbringing” is not so different from saying “I didn’t commit the crime, your honor—it was my hands that did it.” The factors that shaped your decision are, in large part, what you are. Determinism doesn’t relocate the cause of your actions outside you; it traces that cause back through you.

A friend once pressed me with a sharper version of this: we don’t have free will because we don’t get to choose what we want. Our desires themselves are given to us, not selected. This is harder to dismiss, but I think it misunderstands what we mean by “will.” The will is not the wanting—it is the deliberating, the weighing, the acting. The fact that I didn’t design my own preferences no more undermines my agency than the fact that I didn’t design my own hands.

The consciousness argument is similar. Studies suggest that we often make decisions before we’re consciously aware of having made them. This is surprising, but it doesn’t conflict with any meaningful definition of free will. If you ask what is driving those pre-conscious decisions, the answer is always something like: unconscious inference, instinct, habit, accumulated experience. Which is to say—you. The decision may not surface in awareness before it’s made, but it still originates from everything that makes you who you are.

So we come back to the abstraction of the self. We are connected to everything around us, and the boundary between us and the world blurs the more closely we examine it—often, I find, in a way that is more comforting than unsettling. But the blur at the edges doesn’t dissolve what is obvious at the center. We exist. We do things. And it is really us who do them.