Just as Hume showed us, throughout our daily reality are a multitude of intelligible "events" - or patterns of organization we can comprehend, identify, and anticipate - that arise and then pass away. Oftentimes we find these patterns arise in conjunction with each other at various intervals of time and space, and these conjunctions form greater patterns that we comprehend.
But there is no way to decisively identify an absolute causal mechanism that doesn't dissolve into yet another array of patterns of organization. This is the case if you narrow your focus onto concrete, material phenomena, and then further into subatomic phenomena, or whether you expand your focus to include whole systems and even abstractions outside of those systems.
Yet this doesn't seem to pose too serious of a problem to our greater intellectual projects. Because in the end we are content with constructing narratives, or stories, or ideologies that make these constellations of patterns intelligible, that we then put our faith in.
A given ideology should provide a continuous plane of comprehension to traverse. Contradictions or lapses in continuity take one out of one's state of credibility. And if such ideologies have no way of anticipating external events, most individuals will drop them for another. Further we can refine and re-organize these narrative structures to account for changing or dynamic realities, until the contradictions are so numerous that no more revisions or extensions are possible.
Descartes gets panned a lot for introducing a radical project of existential doubt, and then suddenly - perhaps disingenuously - doubling down on a dualist philosophy to construct a sort of bridge between Christianity and the emerging materialist philosophies that were growing in power at the time. One side of the debate has him selling out with his ties to the Catholic church and his lingering Christian faith, watering down his radical early modernist philosophy, while another side would have him departing from and betraying his Christian beliefs for a materialist philosophy.
But what if his philosophy was merely an ideological expression of his actual split nature, a product of a greater metamorphosis that was occurring during the time he lived, and that constructing such a narrative was the best he could have done?
