They, like the human mind, are emergent from the "world," so the issue then becomes trying to follow that thread back.

Our thought process is reductionist, but that yields the more stable constructs, not their source. It's like distilling the body down to its most stable form and you have the skeleton, not the egg from which it sprang.

Which goes to the issue of math and the tendency to treat it as platonic, because that institutionalizes the structure and, implicitly, the power of authority. Top down, rather than bottom up.

Epicycles were brilliant math, as a description of our view of the cosmos, while the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.

Top down describes what is, bottom up explains how it came to be.

Yet our process of gaining knowledge is incremental, as each generation takes the best efforts of their teachers and builds on them. Which is a generative process in itself, but one focused on building structure, not explaining process.

Our two current competing theories, Relativity and Quantum Theory, explain the largest in terms of geometry and the smallest in terms of units, whether waves or particles. All of which are form. Which followed to their extremes, result in this Gordian knot of compounding complexity.

Nature is complicated, or rather expresses complexity. Which tends to build out, until it becomes unstable and collapses back into some more stable form.

Which is about where modern theoretical physics is today, with ever more fantastical patches, yet no one can question any of the underlaying axioms.

Eventually the structure will collapse.