https://leroy.works/ Leroy's works, my personal website with all sorts of writings and projects. Fri, 13 Mar 2026 03:28:31 -0400 en-us https://leroy.works/articles/all-is-decoration-of-the-self/ This article is also on my substack. Sat, 28 Feb 2026 10:22:53 -0500 https://leroy.works/articles/talking-about-good-is-difficult/ This article is a sequel to my plain word explanation of the shadows in the Plato's allegory of the cave. Tue, 17 Feb 2026 20:52:29 -0500 https://leroy.works/articles/hunger-is-shadow/ This is my third attempt to put this argument into plain words. You can read the first here and second here. Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:32:14 -0500 https://leroy.works/articles/i-was-30-before-i-spent-time-alone/ I've also posted this article on my substack. Fri, 30 Jan 2026 10:44:57 -0500 https://leroy.works/articles/why-i-stopped-reading-fiction-and-how-i-found-it-again/ For some reason that I don't understand I've always been searching for something. This need to search has always been present within me but I can't quite put into words what it is that I'm searching for, whether I will ever find it, or if the search will ever finish. Well, I can always find words to describe it but they do a poor job and never capture the depth of what I want to find, if it's even possible to find: I'm always searching for the connection of how my humanity relates to the mystery of all the different lives that have ever lived. Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:35:55 -0500 https://leroy.works/articles/the-golden-rule-of-driving/ Many people I've met seem to believe that daily traffic would be easier to handle if other people just did _this_ -- if other drivers just zipper merge, if other drivers just speed up, if other drivers just get over, if other drivers just slow down, if only other drivers _just let me in!_ then this traffic would go away. Tue, 30 Dec 2025 13:45:23 -0500 https://leroy.works/articles/write-the-instruction-manual-for-your-body/ No body has an instruction manual and nobody was born with one either. As I've gotten older I've come to realize that there's a fundamental level of maintenance that's required to keep our bodies, including our minds, regulated and running properly. I wish I had known about my body's idiosyncrasies a lot earlier as knowing them would have saved me a lot of pain and trouble. Sun, 15 Jun 2025 13:27:17 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/thoughts-are-physical/ Thoughts must be physical because our brains are physical. If the brain is what produces thoughts, and our brain is physical, then thoughts must be the orchestration of the physical symphony of chemicals rushing, receptors activating, and neurons firing. Knowing that thoughts are physical tells us that thoughts must operate under the same law of cause and effect that governs our bodies. Because thoughts are physical then the way we treat our bodies necessarily affects our thoughts. Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:11:12 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/if-you-are-not-your-thoughts-then-who-are-you/ Over the past year I've gotten a few questions about You Are Not Your Thoughts and they all revolve around the question, "If I'm not my thoughts then who am I?" I attempted to answer this question in some short articles that missed the mark for most readers. The main problem is that the answer to the question "Who am I?" cannot be properly given to you by others. It is a question you have to answer for yourself. This means an article designed for widespread readership cannot be as simple and direct as both the readers and myself want. Tue, 04 Jun 2024 15:24:12 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/driving-has-eroded-local-communities-and-created-social-distrust/ The need of owning a car for daily life, outside of select cities, has only been a requirement for the last 60 years. Cars have of course been around longer, but the pervasiveness of car infrastructure, such as highways, is relatively young. To put it into perspective, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act was passed 1956 and ARPANET, the percursor to our Internet, was created in 1969. Mon, 15 Apr 2024 15:11:37 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/corporate-software-development-assumes-software-can-be-append-only/ Current software, including desktop software, phone apps, and websites, have become bloated and full of errors. I think the cause for the now common slew of software problems is entirely in the hands of the corporate structure of software development. Public corporations are incentivized to publish more and more features to appease shareholders and investors. To accomplish this, corporations have structured themselves as fungible groups with individual autonomy rather than as a cohesive unit to produce software. The resulting software is connected piecemeal as a hodgepodge of features from disparate groups and then shipped as-is without consideration of the software as whole. Thu, 29 Jun 2023 21:32:50 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/allegory-of-the-cave-in-plain-words/ Come read an updated, better, and easier to read article on substack. The updated article explains the exact same premise as this one but is clearer. Sat, 27 May 2023 16:53:19 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/calling-your-computer-a-turing-machine-is-controversial/ I've recently learned that calling your computer a Turing Machine is a controversial statement. There seems to be a belief that Alan Turing created a machine with tape and some symbols on it and _then_ wrote down findings about that machine. There also seems to be a belief that our physical machines somehow fundamentally differ from that of the Turing Machine. I want to illustrate some ideas, with the help of some arguments, so we can better understand that our computers really are computing machines, just as Turing has envisioned, and we can call them Turing Machines comfortably. Sun, 07 May 2023 21:17:46 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/answers-to-cicada-3301-2013-questionnaire/ I want to share a list of questions with you. A decade has passed since I have first seen these questions, so I've had a lot of time to think about them. The most striking thing to me is that my answers have changed over time. The striking part is not that I have changed as a person and thus my answers have changed, but that the answers could vary at all. These questions seem obvious and seem like they should have exact answers which require little explanation, but I now think differently. Wed, 03 May 2023 14:58:16 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/a-critique-of-alan-turings-conclusions-on-thinking-machines/ We have thinking machines in our lifetime just as Alan Turing had predicted. Turing made many claims about thinking machines, but most of them relied on the idea that humans are a total sum of their thoughts. If humans are their thoughts, then creating a thinking machine is simply creating a human mind. But humans are not their thoughts and, in fact, thinking is only one aspect of the human mind. Turing didn't understand the fundamental human gift -- agency -- and many of his arguments fall apart with agency in mind. Fri, 14 Apr 2023 15:03:00 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/do-not-dismiss-old-books/ Old texts have been actively preserved for a reason. Think about the buildings which you have seen built and destroyed in your lifetime. How long did they last? Five years? Perhaps even twenty. Old texts are buildings which have lasted _millenia_ yet have not been destroyed. Sun, 02 Apr 2023 12:48:57 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/platos-theory-of-forms-in-plain-words/ If you can think about it, then it must be true. It is your action on that truth which will defile that truth. Wed, 29 Mar 2023 14:29:07 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/people-become-their-thoughts/ People become their thoughts because they let their thoughts command their actions. The problem is that your thoughts are not a unified process, they are a parliament shouting their opinions at _you_. Who are you? The prime minister, the one who chooses. Tue, 28 Mar 2023 16:42:55 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/you-are-not-your-thoughts/ I've written an updated version of this article on my substack. Sun, 26 Mar 2023 15:57:07 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/the-lies-we-believe-about-ourselves/ Over time I have become aware of the power of certain repeated statements. The statements are usually innocuous like "I'm a picky eater" or "I don't like country music". Over time context builds around these statements as you tell them to yourself and others. This context becomes a source of truth even if outright false. This becomes a problem over time when you rely on an array of these "truths" to navigate life. Reassessing these statements can open doors of life previously closed because you believed a small, white lie about yourself. Fri, 17 Mar 2023 16:39:32 -0400 https://leroy.works/articles/social-media-creates-negative-feedback-loops-driving-mental-illness/ I now understand the anti-television arguments from the 1950's and 60's. Those people saw the screen's power to capture attention and glimpsed a very dark future. But I actually think that darkness was held back by one simple fact of television: everything shown on the screen was broadcast. Every television program and advertisement is broadcast to an audience of more than one person, even if that audience is just a bunch of individuals on the couch. It is this fundamental barrier that modern social media apps have broken. These apps show videos and advertisements directly to individuals just like television, however, there is no broadcast and thus no barrier to individual feedback. These apps are designed to mine an individual user's engagement and adapt immediately by showing content which exploits their unconscious to get them to continue scrolling. This feedback loop is the root cause of social media borne mental illness. Fri, 03 Mar 2023 09:41:25 -0500 https://leroy.works/articles/road-design-vs-how-people-actually-drive/ Most people drive automatically. They aren't concerned with driving at all, they are concerned with their destination. Most people don't get in their car in the morning ready to _drive_, they get in their car ready to _get out_. Thu, 16 Feb 2023 17:59:09 -0500