Dear Professor Meehl, Many thanks for sending a copy of your paper. It is good to know that I am not alone in my thinking on these matters. You are correct in noting that determinism and chance are not logical opposites: there is room, logically, for a third possibility. Chance usually is associated with probability, hence relative frequencies (or propensities), and that is a special sort of condition that is surely different from ``pure caprice''. And the opposite of pure caprice is not determinism, because determinism is a very special kind of regularity that is related in a particular sort of way to time. One can certainly imagine other sorts of regulatities. Indeed, classical mechanics is sometimes formulated as a `minimal action' rule connecting the route between certain intitial conditions and certain final conditions. It is certainly conceivable that the `true' laws are more like that, with no rule of the past determining the future. In fact, the idea that the past should determine the future seems to bring in, in an important way, the notion of instants of time, which probably will in the end turn out to be an idea that has only approximate validity. The progression might be more like adding pieces to a jig-saw puzzle, where, however, there is no unique solution. There is a huge gap between `pure caprice' and local (microscopic) causal determinism: all sorts of intermediate possibilities can be imagined. But I think one should try to get something that agrees the the findings of science and in particular of quantum physics, which already is not deterministic (in the normal local sense) and not pure caprice, since there are statistical rules. But I am interested more not just in the principle that there could be a third way, but how it might work in real brains. In this connection I am interested to know how matters now stand in regard to these coincidences of spike timings of which you spoke. The paper you sent looks to be from the early eighties. Is there now any `normal' explanation of how these connections between timings could come about: is there now some essentially mechanistic way to understand the constraints? But does your model actually provide a third way? In the end the `freely' part comes from the free quantum choice which operates within some statistical constraints but is otherwise `purely capricious': that is where the freedom comes from. But them the "I" is not really in charge: there is also this capricious bolt from outside/beyond. So your model is basically a combination of two `bad' processes: the deterministic one that while allowing the process to be controlled by `me' (i.e., by processes going on in my body) also makes me the slave of (blind, myopic) micro-processes; and the capricious one that while allowing me to be "free" makes my decisions capricious. You choose to "accentuate the positive" side of each. Moreover, you seem to accept the violations of the quantum statistical rules. This calls for a whole new level of physical theory, tied, it would seem, to some `soul' that would control these deviation, perhaps on the basis of his own `reflections' upon the matters at hand. This would bring in Eccles's ghost in the (statistical) machine. I stay within the quantum rules, and appeal to the connection between the wholeness of the quantum collapse and the wholeness of our thoughts to bring our thoughts per se into the dynamics in a way that breaks the hold of microprocess. This emphasizes the observer-dependent aspect of quantum theory: it is not as clear as Popper and Feyerabent think that the observer is not important in the quantum aspect of nature. See my website for my recent papers on that subject: http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/stappfiles.html Thanks again for sending your interesting and stimulating paper. Best regards, Henry