Fair point. You are learning a cultural value attached to something that has a physical description.

One possibility might be that a V-I cadence emulates what happens to a sounding body as it loses energy and the sound dies away: the higher partials fade out first, leaving the fundamental. And as you add more energy (strike or blow harder) you will typically actuate a stack of partials (exactly which depends on the physical system). So the harmonic behaviour of physical systems does roughly correspond with what happens in a piece of music as it emerges and returns to silence.

As does arch form in melodies. But there's an interesting discrepancy with regard to octaves: melodically, an octave usually marks an extreme point that demands a downward resolution. Whereas a harmonic octave is next to the fundamental in stability.

The person who's thought hardest about this sort of thing in recent decades was Giacinto Scelsi. I've heard some of his music but don't know his writings. What he ended up with, after perceptual/meditative exercises that involved listening to the same note on a piano for weeks on end, bore no resemblance to any kind of tonality.