Regardless of if it's practical to live that way in daily life, the world seems pretty determined. Everything happens because a vast amount of interactions between infinite factors causes it to. You can't really say you choose between things as many influences have been taken in by you and many things have affected your psychological state. Has everything been practically decided by the big bang? Now, this is not to say we can know everything or predict the future, but we know what's likely. Socialism or extinction may be inevitable, but we don't know yet. Socialism can only happen if people keep fighting, regardless. People will be convinced or principled or not. Science seems to agree with this, and only few, like the wrong Sartre would propose we have ultimate free will. So are there any arguments against determinism? I know there is a saying that you're freer when you recognize how your freedom is restricted, and that recognition may make your actions better, but isn't there ultimately no freedom?
You absolutely can predict things in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is not just "everything is unknowable, throw up your hands and go home". Quantum mechanics does deal with probabilities though.
If I'm playing roulette, and I bet on 36, I can predict that I will lose, but not with absolute certainty. I can also predict that if I bet on 36 ten thousand times in a row, I will win 270 times. It's possible that I win 0 times, and it's possible that I win 10,000 times, but it's much more likely that I win about 270 times.
"Completely unpredictable" is not the same as "not knowable with absolute certainty." There's a big range in between those two absolutes where human beings thrive, doing science and making decisions based on things that can never be known with absolute certainty.
Yeah, as I just responded to someone else, this is the weird intersection between science and philosophy. If I had perfect knowledge about the universe, but I can't predict this quantum interaction, then do I have enough knowledge to predict your actions? How much room do I have before this interaction becomes "well, i can predict with statistical chance, and that is good enough".
BTW, I wasn't throwing up my hands with "we can't predict quantum, so it's all moot'. Like, yeah, I now there's statistics around it, I know more than I let on in that comment, I wasn't here to lecture about quantum mechanics, and as I stated, the ones that do state that this is not fully known science.
Like, literally we don't know if we have free will. That's why this is a philosophical argument. This is just one piece.