Biological intelligence uses a “multiscale competency architecture” (MCA). It exhibits adaptive, goal directed behaviour at all scales, from cells to organs to organisms. In contrast, machine intelligence is only adaptive and goal directed at a high level. Learned policies are passively interpreted using abstractions (e.g. arithmetic) embodied in static interpreters (e.g. x86). Biological intelligence excels at causal learning. Machine intelligence does not. Previous work showed causal learning follows from weak policy optimisation, which is hindered by presupposed abstractions in silico. Here we formalise MCAs as nested “agentic abstraction layers”, to understand how they might learn causes. We show that weak policy optimisation at low levels enables weak policy optimisation at high. This facilitates what we call “multiscale causal learning” and high level goal directed behaviour. We argue that by engineering human abstractions in silico we disconnect high level goal directed behaviour from the low level goal directed behaviour that gave rise to it. This inhibits causal learning, and we speculate this is one reason why human recall would be accompanied by feeling, and in silico recall not.