I understand how it make sense saying that the concept of spedrunning is completely absent in Ocarina Of Time and only exists in the player playing the game, but I do not see how this would be a good philosophy to apply to ourselves.
I confess that I have a particular aversion to this specific philosophy/POV because I feel like it is riding on the respectability and "coolness" of science to sound more serious while being just another metaphysics without (IMHO) any* particularly good qualities.
* Ok, I admit that it has at least a good quality: it is a good example of a non-religious metaphysics to give to people that cannot imagine a non-religious metaphysics.
We have tons of sayings for this like "the map is not the territory," "wherever you go that's where you are."
And that's the case with positive/negative.
For instance, what happens when you connect the two electrodes of a battery to the pins of a semiconductor diode will differ depending on whether you negate the battery or not (i.e. you revert or not its connections). What happens with a ball (or with a thrown stone) will differ depending on whether its velocity is positive or negative, and so on.
Additions and subtractions of physical quantities, therefore also negation, happen in the physical world regardless of the presence of sentient beings.
Humans can recognize such properties of the world and give them names and integrate them in coherent mathematical models, but the base concepts are not inventions, they are the result of empirical observations.
> What happens with a ball (or with a thrown stone) will differ depending on whether its velocity is positive or negative, and so on.
The velocity of a ball is a vector. Using a positive or negative number to describe it is a manner of convention. When you say that you threw a ball with “positive 7 mph” velocity, you need to explain what you mean.
One might argue that there really is a ball and that it has a velocity and that the velocity really is an element in a vector field originating [0] at the center of mass of the ball. Debating to what extent this is fundamentally true or is just a useful concept that people came up with would be interesting.
[0] In general relativity, space is not Euclidean (nor is it a flat Minkowski space), and velocity vectors are only really meaningful in association with a point in spacetime. You can read all about tangent bundles in Wikipedia :)
