Pretty much there. Being born can be viewed as the reason you kill someone, rather than some fact that they ran in front of your car whilst you were driving at 90mph. There is infinite regression in reality but not in abstraction.
We can fall into infinite regression. The situation you outlined with dominoes is an abstract reality. If we are parsing up time as beginning from the initiation of the first domino to fall then that is the Distal cause.
In reality this parsing up of time is completely arbitrary. Of course I fully understand the bonus for scientific experimentation.
I was just wondering why because we experience the world the way we do we assume the world is the way we experience it. The appearance of events running as one that follows another does not rigidly define them as causally connected other than by our experiential perceptions - which are artifacts of culminated culture.
We speak the words we speak because we inherited them not because we created them. In around 200,000 years what is pretty much an evolutionary homeostatic position we have moved strides ahead in terms of our dealings with the environment.
What if our species had no formal language? What if it took over 100,000 years to create a minimal form of language? Dr. John Vervaeke refers to our progression as being driven by psychotechnologies (language, writing, reason, etc.,.). Something along the lines of humanity hitting something equivalent to a Cognitive Singularity that propelled us from partly dumb animals to non-dumb animals. Then, as time moved on we dragged and cultivated ideas through generations to the point where they culminated in the explosion of civilization.
Over all this time the next most significant leap was agriculture, which would require a verbal scheme to plan ahead and think about the future, only really tangible as a collective group with the creation of temporal concepts (more diverse prepositions of time and tense). Then, eventually, the written word and literacy also played a major role.
The very concept of Causation is a tool of understanding the world from our perspectives NOT a given. The power of memory allowed for a 're-cognition' of events and a recognition which led to appreciation of some cyclical procedure (from our perspectives). The refinement of this occurs because we then quantified and atomized the world.
Our stories about the world we live in dominate daily life. Causation does not. The idea of causation is a tool that imagines the world as orderly and was more fully taken to be 'real' due to the 'tool' of quantifying/atomization.
The way I see it, there are three main divisions when it comes to conscious appreciation of the cosmos: Material (physical), Formal (Reason) and Social (Intersubjective).
Causation plays between the Material and Formal, but overreaches into the Social.