How determined are you?

There are some seriosu problems wiht what you write.Firstly it is far from certain that matter and energy behave deterministically. There is no useful deterministic theory of Quantum Mechanics.Secondly, determinism is not identical with predestination.Thirdly I hope that my mind (and yours) operates deterministically or largely so - because te alternative is worse. The question is not how we could work things out if we did behave largely determinisitcally - the real problem is how we could do so if we did not.e

My understanding was that chaos theory was actually applied to improve weather prediction.However chaos is deterministic - the relevance of chaos to this discussion is that it can magnify the effects of chance. Small variations can build up to large effects.

As I understand it the evolution of the wave function is deterministic, however (at least some of the time) it leads to a superposition of states. It is the collapse of the wave function into a single state that is the sticking point.

That doesn't make sense to me. There isn't a state that can be labelled "the state of the system" if the system is in a superposition of states. The wave function may evolve deterministically but it can't predict which of the possible states you will observe if you take a measurement.