The term biophilia, popularized by the biologist Edward O. Wilson (1984) and later adopted by architecture as an imperative to integrate vegetation into built environments, embodies a conceptual ambiguity with profound implications. Drawing upon convergent perspectives from cognitive neuroscience, design theory, and architecture, this paper argues that the human brain does not possess mechanisms for recognizing nature as an ontological category. Rather, it responds to the formal patterns through which nature manifests itself: fractal proportions, organized complexity, dynamic symmetry, and golden-ratio sequences. This distinction carries far-reaching operational implications. On the one hand, it opens the possibility of a genuinely biophilic architecture that does not depend on the incorporation of vegetation. On the other, it warns that the uncritical use of indoor plants may contradict the very mechanisms such interventions are intended to activate.