Human beings are fascinating creatures and one of the oldest philosophical debates is over whether people truly have free will or not. For millennia, scientists have debated over whether free will is simply an illusion of the mind and is a concept that doesn’t even exist, or, if our species naturally possess it. Some experts, such as the philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, argue that we do have free will. He defined it as existing “if our choices are determined by that which we experientially identify with”. Kastrup claimed that his “tastes and preferences” are “consciously felt by” him, thus the choices he makes are “determined by these felt tastes and preferences”. Essentially, Kastrup argues, we are able to choose what action to perform and this gives humans a level of free will. On the other hand, neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky from Stanford University believes humans don’t have any free will, after studying the subject for “decades”. In his book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, Sapolsky argues that almost all of our behaviour as humans is beyond our own conscious control. He argued: “The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over. “We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.” Sapolsky believes that behaviour that we believe originates from free will is actually related to your environment, body, upbringing and genes. Speaking on the CultureLab podcast by New Scientist, Sapolsky explained: “In terms of my orientation, my basic approach is you look at a behaviour and someone has just done something that’s wonderful or awful or ambiguously in-between or in the eyes of the beholder, but some behaviour has happened, and you ask, 'Why did that occur?' and you’re asking a whole hierarchy of questions.” He continued explaining that the prompts to our behaviour could include, “which neurons did what, 10 milliseconds before” and may even originate from “this morning’s hormone levels” and the impact this has on your sensitivity levels in the brain. Additionally, behaviour, he argues can determined by prior trauma and even go back to the “childhood and foetal environment” and our individual genes. To summarise, he argued: “If you’re talking about genes, by definition, genes and behaviour, by definition, you’re talking about evolution and you’re talking about neurobiology and genetic variance and neuronal function. “If you’re talking about, you know, early trauma in life, you’re talking about epigenetics and you’re talking about adult propensity. “So, they’re all one continuous seam of influences, and when you look at it that way, there’s not a damn crack anywhere in there to shoehorn in a notion of free will.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

It’s the most unexpected food trend of the year so far, and now McDonald’s has broken its silence on the Grimace shake going viral. In case you missed it, TikTok has been completely obsessed over a limited edition purple-coloured milkshake over recent days. Grimace has been a mascot in McDonald’s marketing for decades and the fast food giant honoured the 52nd birthday of the character by introducing the new item to menus in the US. Only, since then, TikTok users have made it the focus of a strange trend – which sees them drink it, then pretend to be dead after consuming it. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Typically, the clips see someone sip the drink, before cutting to them in a fake crime scene looking like they’ve been poisoned. Gen Z is always finding new ways to surprise us, and the odd trend has racked up millions of hits. @wheresxander the foot twitch… it’s grimace taking over. #grimaceshake #grimacesbirthday Now, McDonald’s has addressed the trend with a lighthearted Tweet. The official account posted a picture of a Grimace mascot, writing: “meee pretending i don't see the grimace shake trendd.” The milkshake is only set to be on the menu for a limited time, but it looks like the trend isn’t going anywhere just yet - and the memes keep coming thick and fast. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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Microsoft is killing off WordPad, its decades-old text editor in Windows. The company will no longer update the software. It will then remove it from a future version of Windows. WordPad has been around since Windows 95. It has stood somewhere between Word, its more fully-featured text editor, and the simplicity of Notepad. “WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows,” Microsoft wrote in a support note. “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.” WordPad has always been offered for free, in contrast to Microsoft Word, which requires the payment of a fee or subscription. But it lacked many features of Word such as a spellchecker, too, and is unable to save into some key formats. The support note did not explain why it would be removing the software. It added to a page of deprecated software that notes that “new versions [of Windows] also remove features and functionality, often because they’ve added a newer option”. Microsoft’s announcement came soon after it released new updates for Notepad, which also comes free but does not offer the same formatting or features as WordPad or Word. It will be getting autosave and other new features, after the recent addition of dark mode and other changes. As well as coming under competition from its more full-featured and more simplistic siblings, other third-party options such as Google Docs also offer many of the same tools – and much more besides. WordPad on the other hand has been barely touched in years. It was last updated with Windows 8, more than ten years ago, and even then received only a small redesign. Read More Microsoft makes big changes to takeover of Activision Blizzard SpaceX smashes rocket launch record as Musk eyes historic Starship mission Vodafone users say they can’t call people

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