How would you know whether an ancient culture had zero?
johndcook.com32 points by ibobev 4 days ago
32 points by ibobev 4 days ago
Zero has two roles: as a positional placeholder and as a cardinal value (nothingness or net-zero). This only addresses the former.
Afaict, most ancient civization have conception of "nothingness" or "emptiness". The dispute is often whether they consider it as a number or not
Looks like translating a positional numbering system from ancient cultures than ruling out or not if they had the concept of zero. It may be a single use symbol, here is nothing, instead of being part of bigger amounts. Numbering systems doesn't have to be positional (nor go too far).
Gosh I love Wittgenstein for this.
I highly recommend suffering through both early and late Wittgenstein (only wrote 2 books and essentially invented one of the 3 branches of philosophy).
Expect to only understand 10% of what he says, but that is normal.
Separately, pragmatism by William James is an easy 4 hour read and you can have 2/3 of the branches of meta philosophy.
What I wonder is: why has nobody noticed that code editors lack a concept of 0?
When you're writing code, you can express any concept except that of an unfilled hole. We've rearranged every part of the coding process in a twisted-up way, all for the lack of a way to express lack.
If you want to be more clear about what I mean, look to tools which can express holes like https://scratch.mit.edu and https://hazel.org. They give the feeling of letting things snap together like lego bricks. Indeed, lego bricks themselves function because of the negative space (the holes) in them!
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