Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intuition is the name we give to what we learned early. 0 and 1 are both perfectly fine starting points. They both have advantages and disadvantages. 0 is more common since a lot of languages use C as a starting point in some fashion. C chose 0 because then it can create syntactic sugar for sequential memory access via pointers. Or arrays.
No, C got that from B that got it from BCPL, which has that notation to compile faster: http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2013/10/22/citation-needed/
Nice.
It goes deeper than I've been told.