I think a stronger point for your argument could be made by directly contrasting bringing things together and separating the world into things . Spatial separation is probably the first thing humans learn to do in order to count (and our vision apparently does this automatically for small numbers of things), and that can be followed by learning more abstract ways of discretizing. Spatially putting things next to each other to count them is valid so long as the separation remains to keep them distinct. Mentally moving our viewpoint is equivalent to moving the objects being counted next to each other. Glomming things back into a whole is what does not work, as you pointed out. Making it clear that the separation is what allowed the things to be counted in the first place seems like the most important thing to me.
I think a stronger point for your argument could be made by directly contrasting bringing things together and separating the world into things . Spatial separation is probably the first thing humans learn to do in order to count (and our vision apparently does this automatically for small numbers of things), and that can be followed by learning more abstract ways of discretizing. Spatially putting things next to each other to count them is valid so long as the separation remains to keep them distinct. Mentally moving our viewpoint is equivalent to moving the objects being counted next to each other. Glomming things back into a whole is what does not work, as you pointed out. Making it clear that the separation is what allowed the things to be counted in the first place seems like the most important thing to me.