The Matter with Matter

Note to future me: this blog post by Mark Dominus describes a silly math problem which dovetails nicely with my idiosyncratic pseudo-neo-Pythagorean spiritual model:

• One represents the nous.
• All other positive integers represent souls.
• Prime numbers represent gods.
• Composite numbers represent all other souls.
• And... zero represents matter.

Zero doesn't technically exist: it's the limit of existence. Now, I'm one of those horrible people who think Cantor was crazy and insist that you can't get to the end of an infinite sequence (grumble grumble unless you're the nous), but the simple end-run around this is that zero is a multiple of all numbers and no number is a multiple of zero, so it must be "below" every other number, regardless of how far you choose to enumerate them (whether "infinitely far" or not).