alt Hacker NewsNumerals and numbers are directly based on common sense intuition. Even zero, which can be considered a counterintuitive number, was invented several times.
Immense amounts of science are built on incremental advances that apply previous insights to the domain.
The natural numbers, sure. Zero may have been invented several times, but that in no way makes it intuitive. Uncertainty about its validity as a number lasted from the Greeks through to the medieval period.
Yes, I'm aware that incremental advances are par for the course in science. What does that have to do with those advances being common-sense intuitive?