It is probably the ability to make the abstract jump from the data and its correlations to generalised laws that marks the chief difference between people on on

It is probably the ability to make the abstract jump from the data and its correlations to generalised laws that marks the chief difference between people on one hand and animals and machines on the other. Correlation is only useful up to a point. It shows that there may be some relationship between the variables but it says nothing about its nature. Was X caused by Y or was Y caused by X or were X,Y both caused by some unknown Z, was it all just an accidental data sample, was it significant, with how much doubt? Does the assigned significance in fact rely on an unwarranted assumption of some underlying population distribution? Just too many questions and no answers. Besides, causality is problematic enough (see non-aristotelian philosophies and/or quantum mechanics) even without trying to demonstrate it with statistics.