Although dictionaries give the impression of analyzing words all the way down to their very atoms, all they do in fact is graze their surfaces. - Douglas Hofstadter

There are those who will immediately be drawn to the idea of pattern-seeking, and

In the world of living things, the magic threshold of representational universality is crossed whenever a system’s repertoire of symbols becomes extensible without any obvious limit. This threshold was crossed on the species level somewhere along the way from earlier primates to ourselves.

Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals.