The workings of a human eye versus a webcam is mostly an implementation detail IMO and has nothing important to say about what underlies "intelligence" or "world models"

It's like saying a component video out cable for the SNES is intrinsically different from an HDMI for putting an image on a screen. They are different, yes, but the outcome we care about is the same.

As for causality, go and give a frontier level LLM a simple counterfactual scenario. I think 4/5 will be able to answer correctly or reasonably for most basic cases. I even tried this exercise on some examples from Judea Pearl's 2018 book, "The Book of Why". The fact that current LLMs can tackle this sort of stuff is strongly indicative of there being a decent world model locked inside many of these language models.