some not-so-easy thoughts and a harshness truth

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Let’s say we apply this generic statement to quantities of apples. But a quantity of apples is meaningless without some context to describe WHERE (OR IN WHAT SENSE) this quantity exists. The context might be 'on a table', 'in a basket', 'apples that you own', 'apples in a certain building'.
Hence the left-hand side could relate to quantities of apples on my table and the right-hand side could relate to the number of apples on your table. The equals sign means that both tables contain the same quantity of apples.
Now consider we change the statement to be 0+0=0 What are we representing here? It appears that we have added zero apples to your table whereas my table remains unaltered. It appears that you now have two groups of zero apples on your table, and it might not be immediately obvious why this is logically incorrect. To see why it is logically incorrect, consider the scenario where we both have 3 apples on our respective tables: 3 = 3. The table is the container and we can define a 'group' of apples as a quantity of apples connected by touch. Therefore if my table always contains one group of apples then you could re-group the apples on your table to show that: 3 = 2 + 1, 3 = 1 + 1 + 1 But in the case of zero apples, they cannot be re-grouped. There is always just zero apples. We cannot have 0 + 0 apples on a single table.