Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2026 number 2

The paper studies the foundations of physical ontologies - systems of basic entities employed by physical theories. The author argues that these ontologies have two interrelated biological foundations: a perceptual one (the human sensory interface is evolutionarily calibrated to the “middle world” - the mesocosm in K. Lorenz’s sense) and a communicative one (natural language as a serial discretizing system). This thesis is examined in the light of information thermodynamics (R. Landauer’s principle, J. Wheeler’s “It from Bit” hypothesis), K. Friston’s free-energy principle, and D. Hoffman’s interface theory of perception, which together form a mutually coherent theoretical framework. Classical and non-classical physical ontologies are analysed: it is shown that even the most abstract theories (quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and string theory) retain “birthmarks” of mesocosmic origin in their verbal conceptualizations. Special attention is paid to the distinction between a theory’s mathematical formalism and its verbal ontology as the primary source of conceptual paradoxes when extrapolating beyond the mesocosm. The paper concludes with considering AI as a cognitive agent whose data compression does not necessarily reproduce mesocosmic structure.