No, numbers represent real things. Its only when you get onto the complex where something physically impossible is represented.
Indeed? What IS a number then?
And what is your means of individuation,
which allows you to number things?
Normal numbers represent real things, so how many books are on a shelf, what proportions a cake has been cut into etc. Negative numbers can represent an absense of something. How can you directly represent a real thing with x + yi ?
How many is a number - an abstraction of the mind.
Proportions likewise. The cake MIGHT be a real
thing, if you come up with some method of individuating
it - both from all other cakes, and more difficultly, from the
other 'stuff' around.
My point is, like words, numbers are just a part of our models.
They don't have any reality of their own.