There are other views. I find it does not help to distinguish stochastics from determinism since, as David Thomley notes in his comment, the two seem compatible. Presumably the interactions that create the statistics are determined even if we cannot easily predict their outcome (much like the distribution of prime numbers).
Another view would be to say that all events are determined and law-governed but in a manner that is compatible with human freewill. This is not a fundamental view since it reifies human beings, freewill and the phenomenal universe but it can work as long as we concede this.
A good description of this other view would require delving deep into the doctrine of the Upanishads, Buddhism, Taoism and so forth and you might not want to go there, but it is an alternative view to the two you mention.
EDIT: This was a little abrupt so here are some quotations to flesh things out. The choice is randomly determined by what I happened to come across first in my quote-bank but it is just to give a flavour of this other view, not to explain it.
On freewill Ramesh Balsekar writes this, giving the meaning of ‘Wu Wei’, or non-volitional living.
"Living volitionally, with volition, with a sense of personal doership, is the bondage. Would, therefore, living non-volitionally be the way in which the sage lives? But the doing and the not-doing - the positive doing and the negative not-doing - are both aspects of ‘doing’. How then can the sage be said to be living non-volitionally? Perhaps the more accurate description would be that the sage is totally aware that he does not live his life (either volitionally or non-volitionally) but that his life - and everyone else’s life - is being lived.
What this means is that no one can live volitionally or otherwise; that, indeed, ‘volition’ is the essence of the ‘ego’, an expression of the ‘me’ concept, created by ‘divine hypnosis’ so that the ‘lila’ of life can happen. It is this ‘volition’ or sense of personal doership in the subjective chain of cause-and-effect which produces satisfaction or frustration in the conceptual individual.
Again, what this means is that it is a joke to believe that you are supposed to give up volition as an act of volition! ‘Let go’ - who is to let go? The ‘letting-go’ can only happen as a result of the clear understanding of the difference between what-we-are and what-we-appear-to-be. And then, non-volitional life or being-lived naturally becomes wu wei, spontaneous living, living without the unnecessary burden of volition. Why carry your luggage when you are being transported in a vehicle?
To be enlightened is to be able to accept with equanimity anything in life at any moment as God’s will.
(Ramesh Balsekar, The Ultimate Understanding)
“I asked G. what a man had to do to assimilate this teaching.
“What to do?” asked G. as though surprised. “It is impossible to do anything. A man must first of all understand certain things. He has thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly about himself, and he must get rid of some of them before beginning to acquire anything new. Otherwise the new will be built on a wrong foundation and the result will be worse than before.”
““How can one get rid of false ideas?” I asked. “We depend on the form of our perceptions. False ideas are produced by the forms of our perception.”
G shook his head.
“Again you speak of something different,” he said. “You speak of errors arising from perceptions but I am not speaking of these. Within the limits of given perceptions man can err more or err less. As I have said before, man’s chief delusion is his conviction that he can do. All people think that they can do, and the first question all people ask is what they are to do. But actually nobody does anything and nobody can do anything. This is the first thing that must be understood. Everything happens. All that befalls a man, all that is done by him, all that comes from him - all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as rain falls as a result of a change in the temperature in the higher regions of the atmosphere or the surrounding clouds, as snow melts under the rays of the sun, as dust rises with the wind.
Everyone finds that nothing is being done in the way it ought to be done. Actually everything is being done in the only way that it can be done. If one thing could be different everything could be different. … Try to understand what I am saying. Everything is dependent on everything else, everything is connected, nothing is separate. Therefore everything is going in the only way it can go. If people were different everything would be different. They are what they are, so everything is as it is.”
This was very difficult to swallow.
“Is there nothing, absolutely nothing, that can be done?” I asked.
“Absolutely nothing”.
“And can nobody do anything?”
“That is another question. In order to do it is necessary to be. And it is necessary first to understand what to be means.”
P.D.Ouspensky
Conversation with Gurdjieff
In Search of the Miraculous - Fragments of
an Unknown Teaching (1949)
Penguin Arkana, London (p 20)
"Furthermore," Zen master continued, "for the reformation of mind it is good to observe the principle of cause and effect. For example, even if others hate us, we should not resent them; we should criticize ourselves, thinking why people should hate us for no reason, assuming that there must be a causal factor in us, and even that there must be other as yet unknown casual factors in us.
Maintaining that all things are effects of causes, we should not make judgments based on subjective ideas. On the whole, things do not happen in accord with subjective ideas; they happen in accord with the laws of Nature. If you maintain awareness of this, your mind will become very clear."
Source: Zen Antics
