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Hi, my name is Pedro, although in my family almost everyone calls me Peter. I was born in Portugal and lived here most of my life. I spent just a few months in Paris, where I did a graduation on cognitive science and also a few months in Tucson where I tried to do something useful on quantum mechanics and the brain (working under Stuart Hameroff's supervision).Life is for me a great mystery. I don't think the many thousands of years our civilization has had to perfect its knowledge of the world has contributed much to unravel these mysteries. Why is there something instead of nothing? Where does all the complexity originates from? Is consciousness really a result of "blind" matter? Or, by the contrary, is all matter capable of consciousness, even if in the smallest degree? Are we really free or are we just complex machines that (must) describe themselves as free?I also am interested in more practical things, right now I'm starting to learn programming languages, I know just a lit bit about java.Regarding movies, my favorite directors include: Cameron, Kubrick, Clint Eastwood, Cohen brothers, Tarantino, Scorcese, Wachowski brothers, Tim Burton and Peter Jackson.Also these actors almost always appear in movies to my liking: Kevin Spacey, Jim Carrey, Jeff Bridges, and others. I'd sure love if there were more sci-fi movies. I pass a substantial amount of my time trying to imagine what the future will be like, and what we, humanity, are in this endless tapestry of change.I also love music and art. One of my favorite paintings is "The Kiss", by Klimt, but I also love Renoir and others.Politically I think we are destroying the world. One of the most clear expositions of this is "The Story of Stuff", which I've seen several times, and the documentary "Home". Clearly we are the most powerful species of the planet, we don't have predators, we plant more than we can eat, we have machines to do most of the hard tasks for us. So why do we work so much? Why don't we have time for our kids, for our family and friends? Time to grow, to love? Because we are in this frenzy to always get more and more. But iPhones and tablets won't give us happiness, by the contrary: we are hungry for what can't fulfill us.I hope this will be a fruitful experience,p.