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RichardKennaway comments on Causal Diagrams and Causal Models - Less Wrong
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I don't have an answer to my own koan, but this was one of the possibilities that I thought of:
But how does one intervene? By causing some variable to take some value, while obstructing the other causal influences on it. So causal knowledge is already required before one can intervene. This is not a trivial point -- if the knowledge is mistaken, the intervention may not be successful, as I pointed out with the example of trying to warm a room thermostat by placing a candle near it.
Causal knowledge is required to ensure success, but not to stumble across it. Over time, noticing (or stumbling across if you prefer) relationships between the successes stumbled upon can quickly coalesce into a model of how to intervene. Isn't this essentially how we believe causal reasoning originated? In a sense, all DNA is information about how to intervene that, once stumbled across, persisted due to its efficacy.