How inevitable is the concept of numbers?
I can understand how natural numbers can be “constructed” (for lack of a better word) as a byproduct of counting, what I could never understood on a deeper level are negative numbers, I can’t see how a number i.e. a count can be lower than zero.<p>Maybe related, while I can also partially understand multiplication (syntactic sugar for adding) I could never understand multiplication by zero, meaning how come when you multiply a number (no matter how big) by zero you get zero as a result.<p>Maybe there’s some Wittgenstein-like material somewhere that will better explain this, in which case I’ll very happy for some references.