Piano with Elephant

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Originally uploaded by douglasstruth

There's a physics theory that time doesn't exist (best laid out in The End Of Time by Julian Barbour) which I find very persuasive. It is, in a few words, this: there's a multidimensional space where all possible universes exist. Only a few of those possible universes support life and our (so-called) intelligence. We find ourselves in one now. Consciousness is the mystery here. How it "finds itself" in any particular place. No one knows.

But even if you accept the theory, and the idea that any moment's history is encoded within it (since each moment is separate from all others, and what seems like continuity is mere adjacency,) how does music work? Any particular note means nothing without the context of all the notes that came before it. We anticipate the notes to come, and when they aren't "right" it doesn't sound like music...

Where are we?