> Even if you just tally things, computations may produce zero It may produce zero but not necessarily. Tallying things is more likely to produce a notion of

> Even if you just tally things, computations may produce zero It may produce zero but not necessarily. Tallying things is more likely to produce a notion of "alright, no one owes anyone anything", and there's no need to track this "nothing". Only when things don't tally is it required to keep track. Because there's no use persisting this "nothing"ness over space and time it's unlikely to have been abstracted further to zero.