This question doesn't really matter. Actually you don't need even to involve Platonism here. You can assign numbers to every musical notation symbol, pitch, etc., much in the same way Gödel did for mathematics. In this sense every musical composition receives its Gödel number. When you see it in this way it seems that every conceivable musical composition already exists because the numbers can be easily listed. So every new musical hit from now on, can be converted to its Gödel number and we can say: "see, nothing new under the Sun. This is simply song 983275923...(many..more..digits)....57893427934875." Should we feel disappointed that our new musical idea was already in the list?Eugene I wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 2:27 pm When a composer creates a new music, it is indeed a new musical idea, or does he simply read it from the pre-existing library of all musical ideas?
My sense is the Platonic view (timeless pre-existence of all possible ideas) makes the creation activity meaningless. Such activity would simply be searching through the library, nothing new is created. I'm involved in the creative work and my sense is that the universe of living ideas is continuously evolving and growing, both within the corporeal human realm and beyond it, with new ideas and meanings being constantly created and sprout from the already existing ones, and then shared across the universe. I can not prove it of course and I may be wrong, but this is how I fell.
There are many examples that can be given. If we take a block of stone can we say that the work of the sculptor is meaningless because every conceivable statue is already contained in the stone?
Here's a funny site
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)
It's a 'database' for all possible 256-bit Bitcoin private keys
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)
I'm not saying that ideas are enumerable. Clearly, if real numbers (which are concepts) are not, what's left for ideas in general! We simply need to change the way we think about this. There are two Great Poles of existence between which Time integrates. In certain sense the alpha and omega points are known. The whole potential between them can also be said to exist all at once and eternally. But there are infinite ways that this potential can be traversed. Even though the unique path is sure to exist within the total potential, it's still a unique experience to walk this path. This is the apparent mystery - the integrated meaning of everything exists between the poles, yet to experience some of this potential in differentiated manner is a unique experience which cannot be known from the integrated perspective. So even though every musical piece is there in the eternal shelf, it's still a unique experience to create/differentiate it and hear it apart from all others. And thus, even though the seed-singularity from which the Infinite grows is the same seed to which everything flows in, there are Infinite different ways that this Time-evolution can be experienced.
Probably the stumbling stone here is to confuse the meaningful potential, for simultaneous experience of all infinite differentiated possibilities. In certain sense the experience of the potential really is the superposition of all possibilities but their simultaneous experience, even though meaningful in itself, is not as if we understand every possibility independently but somehow all at once. Probably light is the best symbol of this. White light contains all possibilities, yet it is not experienced as simultaneous consciousness of the distinct colors.