>>17870168
Which law of logic does this violate? It's not the law of non-contradiction that's for sure. Also for the longest time we did not even have a concept of zero and the numeral system worked fine so clearly there's something wrong with your reasoning. Even now we can create a numeric system without it being represented except just as absence of a number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijective_numeration#The_bijective_base-10_system or we can completely exclude it from the natural number system like pic rel. That being said zero is not nothingness, but it represent absence in most contexts sure. Nothingness has literally no properties, how do you know how multiplication works for it? You can also just think of it as another position on the number line marked as the origin without any of them representing anything real in particular. If you disagree then what's -1 apples in a basket? Are you saying there's a thing that is even less than nothing? What about sqrt(-1) apples? That's even closer to nothingness because it doesn't exist and as such it's not a thing