Philosophizing, Part 1

[Cave: I like Camus and Fight Club too much for this to really count as original thought, but rather a re-examining of the sciences through glasses that others have constructed. I'd shudder to call it philosophy, but rather musing. And none of this is concrete belief, either, but merely the following of logic trains to their inevitable conclusion. The acceptance of that logic is another matter entirely.]
The fundamental reason that I don't like biology, especially cellular-tissue level biology is that i reduces human action to a mechanical string of reactions that fools itself into thinking that it is self-aware and self-determining. A cute trick, certainly, but a little disheartening. You kiss someone and think that you love them, but it's nothing more than a (theoretically) predictable and certainly uncontrollable string of chemical reactions in your brain that ramifies and feeds back to the other person. It even makes individiuality a moot point, since we trigger all of these back and forth reactions. What are our bodies and senses of individuality but arbitrary divisions, pieces of the greater biomass that think we're special just because we can't see how interwoven we are with everything else. It you have such a big impact on me, and I on you, but neither of s has much real control over "ourselves" or "each other", then why even make that separation? I have no control over the chemical reactions that compose me (more on that at a later date), but my reactions greatly affect yours and vis versa. Indeed, I could be said to have more control over you than you have over yourself, and vis versa, again. Unless you reject science wholesale, there can be no true, meaningful individuality. Not that that's a bad thing. Though it does make all of the nasty things we humans do to one another all the more grim.

From a biological perspective, the end goal of life is to beget more life. That's a sort-of purpose, and some hope can be derived from that. Humans can reconcile themselves to an endgame of that variety. Chemistry, on the other hand, seems much more pessimistic (or something like that). The chemist sees the universe without pourpose, but merely a trend toward ever-greater entrpy. Everything that we make and do will eventually be nothing but lonely atoms and ions drifting through space, increasingly more spread out and isolated in the infinite expanse of the universe. Even life, then, is merely a slowing of entropic growth, and the whole institution must eventually expire. Now you could go a step lower to the realm of physics and argue that maybe other universes tend toward order, but that's little comfort for us. You could also throw out the whole thing and go live in Alabama, but personally I'd miss hockey too much for that. So what then? Well, not much. You can take that half-step and accept the quantum mechanist's hope that the increasing disorder of our universe is vital to the maintenance of theoretical order in another theoretical universe that may or may not (theoretically) contain life. Or you can simply give up hope, embrace that hopelessness as liberation and exult in your present existence, stop worrying about a future that doesn't exist and which you cannot reach.

At some later point: free will.