OP is saying that we have a complex brain which allows us to reflect on our biological impulses and choose whether or not to answer the instinct to reproduce. I

OP is saying that we have a complex brain which allows us to reflect on our biological impulses and choose whether or not to answer the instinct to reproduce. I'm arguing instead that we - as complex frontal-cortex-having organisms - have no more choice than fire does whether to make more of ourselves. And abstractly our existence follows the same flowchart as that of a fire but, as the kids say these days, "with extra steps." Our integrity and thus identity floats upon a process of degrading complex configurations of energy into simpler, uniform ones. If fire were to gain sentience and therefore know what it was up to, this would not change its essential prerogative to keep doing it, in order to be able to keep doing it.