We think we're so smart because we causally understand the world, but it took us a very long time to collectively discover these principles. A human alone would not be so smart.

I think this confuses (fact) knowledge and the ability to recognize causal relations.

A human can never be smarter than said human: Our brains are not connected and we can't share capacity with others.

So, discovering causality is always an individual experience. And that happens likely by "playing" with "the world".

I think it's noticeable that smarter animals are more playful. Which is also a hint that points to the fundamental importance of interaction with the world as a prerequisite for "smartness". Additionally the capabilities of the "sensors" and "actors" that make interaction with the world possible in the first place seem to be crucial to develop "smart behavior".

The part about the "sensors" seems quite obvious. I think one can gain a better general understanding of some thing if one can "experience" it in more than one "dimension".

And the "actors" allow one to perform "experiments" with the things around one, and find out this way how that thing "works" or is supposed to be "used".

That's actually the behavior that can be observed in children of all kinds of "smarter" species. So it seems to be at least linked somehow to "smartness".

Empirical evidence is a special case observation. If you observe the whole universe in its entirety, you could separate moments that effectively followed whatever conditions you might set in a lab. You can't act on the system, but you can forever tune your models to match the infinite observations you could record. At that point the separation between observation derived knowledge versus experiential knowledge is meaningless (it's just hard to imagine a universal model manifesting without having used experiental knowledge along the way).

Whether you swing the bat or just watch it hit the ball into the sky, you have the prerequisites needed to reason about the interaction.

A more entertaining question is how a system comes to believe causality (i.e. comes to believe that things can and must have causes)

I agree. To say we're able to influence the system is to assume free will, which I believe is an undecidable problem. Ultimately this is just a matter of semantics, which makes this thread rather pointless.

It does not need to assume free will, which indeed is a much harder philosophical issue - it needs to assume that the decisions of the intervention are caused by factors outside of the system you're studying (which usually isn't the whole world), which is easy to get if you have some actual external influence, and very hard to determine if you're purely observing.

For example, if you're allocating patients in control and treatment group based on a roll of dice - the dice don't have free will, but they are influencing the "system" of the patients and their treatment, while that system is not causually influencing the dice rolls.

For another example, if a baby is "experimenting" by babbling (a key part of language acquisition, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbling), it's not necessary or relevant to decide whether free will is involved, the baby obtains useful experimental results of what sound experiences are caused by which attempts to move the tongue/mouth/etc, even if there's no free will and the attempts to move the tongue/mouth/etc are also deterministically caused by the sensory experiences of the baby.

> (it's just hard to imagine a universal model manifesting without having used experiental knowledge along the way)

That's actually the point!