> This is what a negative number is, by the way: a mathematical abstraction to describe a deviation towards nothingness.
Some explanation of this statement would be nice. Traditionally, 0 represents "nothing", and an increasingly negative quantity is getting further away from 0, not approaching it.
When you say this you're already in the realm of abstraction. For anyone who has learned more math than a 10-year-old, it's so easy to use these abstractions that we forget how the "natural numbers", i.e. the non-negative integers, are in fact more concrete, more closely related to reality than the full set of integers (or other even more abstract sets like complex numbers). But they really are.
There can't be less than zero apples in the universe, so saying you have "-2" apples isn't somehow getting further from zero, unless you use an abstract scale that isn't the actual number of apples in the universe.
> This is what a negative number is, by the way: a mathematical abstraction to describe a deviation towards nothingness.
Some explanation of this statement would be nice. Traditionally, 0 represents "nothing", and an increasingly negative quantity is getting further away from 0, not approaching it.
When you say this you're already in the realm of abstraction. For anyone who has learned more math than a 10-year-old, it's so easy to use these abstractions that we forget how the "natural numbers", i.e. the non-negative integers, are in fact more concrete, more closely related to reality than the full set of integers (or other even more abstract sets like complex numbers). But they really are.
There can't be less than zero apples in the universe, so saying you have "-2" apples isn't somehow getting further from zero, unless you use an abstract scale that isn't the actual number of apples in the universe.