Where Did Zero Come From
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Never really thought about it too much, but for a long time, there was no concept of the number "zero". Some background on where it came from.
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Never really thought about it too much, but for a long time, there was no concept of the number "zero". Some background on where it came from.
@taiwan_girl IIRC Jean Gebser wrote somewhere on the development of consciousness and the awareness that “nothing” could exist as a concept. It’s crucial to humanity’s earliest philosophical intuition.
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From a modern perspective, I think there is no need for a philosophical justification about "zero", or speculations about the meaning of nothingness.
Zero isn't any more or less real than any other number. You can't touch it, just as you can't touch 7. You just define it into existence by an axiom.
The reason why it is convenient to have zero is to have a "neutral element" of addition, i.e., adding 0 to something doesn't change it. Similarly, one is the neutral element of multiplication.
It is simply inconvenient to have an "algebraic structure" (a set with operations on it) without neutral elements. Maths would be way more complicated.
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I thought it came out of nowhere
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Mitsubishi?
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@taiwan_girl IIRC Jean Gebser wrote somewhere on the development of consciousness and the awareness that “nothing” could exist as a concept. It’s crucial to humanity’s earliest philosophical intuition.
@Ivorythumper interesting. I went down the "internet hole" reading about him. LOL
