…CAUSE OF…

Stage 62 / Saturday 26 June / From Hontanas to Itero del Castillo / 22 km

 

The whirl between space and time, their contractions and dilations, the lack of objective positioning of the particle when one searches for it, this all makes more of a frantic whirl spin in my head as I leave Hontanas. This space-time duo haunts and disturbs me, and I am thrown into indecision about the principle of causality which is strongly linked: the tie which links cause and effect.

 

Here is an example of ties between cause and effect: the rising wind rises and sweeps my face; the sweat there evaporates more quickly because the wind is dry. This phenomenon (a change from liquid to gaseous state) absorbs energy and thus removes the heat. This forces a lowering of the temperature on the surface where my sweat evaporates! My face profits from it! The evaporation withdraws calories from my face and lowers my skin temperature! On the other hand, I mustn’t forget to drink water regularly to replace the volumes lost by sweating …

 

All this empirical logic, verified from experience, makes me appreciate a gust of dry wind in great heat. Now, here is where I have doubts again about the same principle of causality, for if in certain cases it becomes illusory, what audacity! Yet it is this robust principle that permits me to prepare for my near future in my present: I’m hot and thirsty, water appeases thirst, and I go to fill my canteen at the first fountain I find!

 

I affirm at the same time that the same causes produce the same effects, but that the circumstances are never reproduced identically: the heat of the day, the degree of humidity in the wind, the quantity of water absorbed, etc. But the scale of observation makes certainties much more random: what happens on the subatomic scale is much less rigid than what happens on the human or cosmic scale. Is this a question of vocabulary, should we speak about influence rather than cause on the cosmic scale? Causality would then no longer be a physical law, nor a macroscopic law, like when we passed from Newton’s mechanics to quantum mechanics …

 

And all first causes would thus be masked when one moves down the scale of greatest to smallest. Our little brains, so capable of understanding the chain of causes, are perturbed when they seek a first cause of life, a first cause of our existence. So it must be one or the other: either this first cause is totally absent, and continuing to search for it would be in vain; or else this first cause truly does exist, but it simply isn’t accessible to the human brain!

 

And Cartesian that I am, instead of continuing to build on this dilemma of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” shouldn’t I be searching for the how rather than the why? This seems to be what the Asians do. Their serenity seems to be less affected by it, they are much more easily “zen.” And this approach doesn’t prevent them from finding their own explanations of “why?” as well as “how?”! In terms of protecting oneself from the sun, there is a whole Buddhist symbolism in the umbrella, the dome represents wisdom, and the fringed contour is compassion …

 

If in our religious culture, we decide too easily to want to see God as the first and ultimate cause of everything, and if our scientists are continually getting lost in conjectures, should I be content for the moment to say that this ultimate cause is purely undecidable? I arrive near the very simple and welcoming San Nicolás hostel just after Itero del Castillo. It’s the end of the week, and first cause or ultimate cause, let’s stop “causing” [causer means chatting in French], a good rest tomorrow will do me good!