Before Zero

I've heard it said that humans would understand relativity as well as we understand time and gravity, if we moved anywhere near the speed of light. It is wild to think about how widespread conceptual tools like calculus or algebra are now, but how staggeringly intelligent those inventing and initially communicating these ideas were. It is difficult to even imagine a world where concepts that we consider basic and fundamental, like gravity, were not only undefined, but the ways of defining such things were experientially inaccurate and likely still hotly debated and defended (such as impetus).

What specifically has been on my mind recently though, along this train of thought, is zero. The first recorded instance of zero was apparently from 3 B.C., in Mesopotamia. This means that humans before this, worldwide, had an entirely different thoughtform than we have today, when it came to both counting and nothing. Not only that, but zero did not reach western Europe until the 12th century. While it might be difficult to imagine needing to explain the basic concept and use of zero to any adult today, not only would one have had to try to explain zero before these times, but attempting to do so would have likely irritated the other, been generally unaccepted, and may have gotten one mocked or worse. 

I was trying to picture how this thoughtform difference would even be experienced, and I am finding that I cannot. Zero now feels like a piece of software, installed almost entirely worldwide, that the hardware of the human brain feels incomplete without (much like primary language). I was trying to imagine a trade, the same trade, being made, before and after zero. I realized that indicating you want zero of an item, and indicating that you do not want an item are considered synonymous now, but are technically different thoughts, merging both the concept of "not trading" and "trading nothing" in the mind, numerically. Before zero, I imagine that indicating you would want none of an item would exclusively be registered as "no trade," and not as an empty set trade. While this difference seems subtle, perhaps purely semantics to some, the concept of zero essentially added a choice of mental pathway to this scenario, and one that keeps the communicating minds within the framework of a trade, rather than shifting one or both minds to "no trade," which could also influence the overall outcome. 

While this examination might feel granular in an unnecessary way, I believe that trying to picture the fundamental processing of those humans who have come before us has meaning, and hopefully this example illuminates at least a single crossroads in the mind, that feels fundamental and perhaps even intrinsic today, but was established (well) along the way.

This concept of the hardware of the brain feeling incomplete, in retrospect, once a piece of software, such as zero, is added, feels like it has potential. While the general human process is to reach and understand an external barrier, and then conceive of a way around it by developing a tool, what if another way could be reliably established? We can comprehend the lack of something critical when examining our group experience in reverse; could we identify such a future leap in experience by assessing how the usage of the brain feels incomplete today? What is tomorrow's "zero?" It feels as though my recent examination into "Establish Random" might be searching out this presently missing software that will make our current processing feel woefully incomplete to future generations, but what else might it be? How could the mathematical representation of nothing provide so much value to the human experience, and how will this same step next be accomplished?