Lovely! Made me smile. 
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The principle of paticcasamupada is nicely described here in MN38:
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Bhante, it is generally not considered reasonable to infer the results of doing based on observed regularities. This is summed up in the imperfect adage ‘correlation does not imply causation’.
It is generally accepted that you can only infer doing from observing if you have ruled out alternative causal explanations for the patterns you are observing.
For example, carrying a lighter in your pocket is associated with lung cancer because smoking raises the probability of both carrying a lighter in your pocket and getting lung cancer. It is not reasonable to infer from this pattern that removing pockets from pants (an intervention/doing) will have any effect on lung cancer rates.
Another way to put it is that we can only infer doing from observation given some pre-existing assumptions of how reality works.
For example, rooster crowing is associated with the sun rising, but we can feel pretty confident that this association is generated by the fact that roosters are crowing as a reaction to the sun. We need only appeal to our mental model of the solar system, the sun doesn’t really have any means to react to rooster crows, so we can safely rule out the other possible explanation for the observed patterns, that the rooster crows are causing the sun to rise.
It sort of feels like this is what you’re aiming at?:
Right, but this is essentially what modern causality researchers are saying too; “The data alone is never enough for causality. We must always appeal to some understanding/model of reality outside the data to make inferences about causality”.
Basically, observations + assumptions = causality.
Have you considered interventionism as an approach to causality? To my mind this is closer to what ordinary people put in the word ‘cause’:
- Interventionism: “A causes B” because if we ‘turn off’ A by intervening on it, B ceases. If we intervene on A again and turn it on, we see B appear again.
This conceptualization of causality puts doing rather than observing at the core of causality. Generally, it’s not reasonable to infer doing from observing, but it is often reasonable to infer ‘what we will observe’ from doing (we can always just do stuff and then see what happens).
To my understanding, the Buddha’s teachings is essentially one big intervention applied to the mind to turn off delusion. Turn off delusion, and no more suffering is the result.
(alternately a ‘switch wisdom on’ intervention).
IMO the average practicing scientists doesn’t really understand the difference between causality and correlation. However, they know you’re almost never supposed to claim causality, so they use defensive language like “our antecedents predicted 30% of the variance of the target variable”.
The average scientists is just trying to survive in a “publish and perish” world IMO.
I know this thread is quite old, but I was watching the highly enjoyable Dependent Origination in early Buddhism videos by Ven. @sujato and Ven. @Brahmali and the topic of conditionality/causality came up.
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In my experience we do.
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