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Exciting Life Updates

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I know I haven’t been updating this blog because I’m too lazy. Years 2 and 3 have been an exciting flurry of business (both work and busy-ness). I constantly spew bite-sized thoughts that stream into my mind on Instagram Stories anyway, and I am remarkably easily bored and excitable, so longer, more considered pieces on Blogger aren’t sustainable. I digress. Many exciting life updates! I’m now officially done with my undergraduate PPE programme at King’s College London. I loved every bit of it: the depth, rigour and intellectual intensity of the course, the international student community, the bustling city of London and all the travel opportunities around Europe. Words can’t do justice to the profundity of the experience. In typical Quincean fashion, I milked everything I could out of the three years: went to Cumberland Lodge (for free) as a photographer with the Philosophy Department in Years 1 and 3, clinched the Principal’s Global Leadership Award (PGLA) in my second year (spending...
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Exciting Life Updates

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I know I haven’t been updating this blog because I’m too lazy. Years 2 and 3 have been an exciting flurry of business (both work and busy-ness). I constantly spew bite-sized thoughts that stream into my mind on Instagram Stories anyway, and I am remarkably easily bored and excitable, so longer, more considered pieces on Blogger aren’t sustainable.

I digress. Many exciting life updates!

I’m now officially done with my undergraduate PPE programme at King’s College London. I loved every bit of it: the depth, rigour and intellectual intensity of the course, the international student community, the bustling city of London and all the travel opportunities around Europe. Words can’t do justice to the profundity of the experience. In typical Quincean fashion, I milked everything I could out of the three years: went to Cumberland Lodge (for free) as a photographer with the Philosophy Department in Years 1 and 3, clinched the Principal’s Global Leadership Award (PGLA) in my second year (spending a weekend also at Cumberland Lodge), qualified for the Table Tennis men’s second team and represented KCL at BUCS inter-university competitions, and most recently got selected from among 60 applicants to be the King’s Undergraduate Research Fellow (KURF) in Bioethics who will work on controversial philosophical issues surrounding pregnancy and birth with Professor Elselijn Kingma this July.

As I myself like to say, “follow the intrinsic and the instrumental will follow; follow the instrumental and all will be hollow”. Indeed, this has been the case: I’ve topped my PPE cohort in Years 1 and 2, and I am now awaiting the release of my Year 3 results (a Grand Slam would be fantastic). Furthermore, I’ve achieved this unconventionally, through specialising in my comparative advantage: philosophy. It is almost unheard of for a PPE student to specialise in philosophy because of its supposedly lower return on investment as compared to specialising in economics. I’ve made it work and I’m confident I’ll continue to prove the world wrong, thereby showing future generations what is possible and inspiring them. You really have to play hard-to-get with material rewards. Don’t chase them; make them chase you!

I am also excited to be moving to the University of Chicago to do a Master’s in Philosophy this autumn. For now it looks like a perfect growth opportunity: new, yet not unfamiliar; “same same but different”. I have been involved with the KCL Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law for the past two years, attending the regular KJuris jurisprudence / political philosophy series of visiting lectures, taking modules from affiliated faculty and specialising in analytical approaches to questioning normative phenomena such as autonomy, authority, rights, and obligations. I have had the privilege to indulge in countless opportunities to pick the brains of legends in the field: Leif Wenar, Julia Driver, Nomy Arpaly, Christine Korsgaard, and current KCL professors Andrea Sangiovanni, Massimo Renzo and David Owens. I can’t wait to continue this streak at the American intellectual powerhouse that is UChicago.

In passing, I’ll just share a little idea I’ve had for a year now. It is the Heaven Objection to Nozick’s Experience Machine Objection to Hedonism About Well-Being. (A mouthful, I know, but you know I am pompous and dramatic.) The idea is that an experience machine is a non-actual world of pleasurable experiences, so heaven is an experience machine. Since heaven is not objectionable, an experience machine is not objectionable. It is thus inconsistent to reject hedonism by rejecting the experience machine while not rejecting heaven. Heaven and the experience machine stand or fall together. ∎


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