> If a duff chord is played out of hours in a full morgue where no living person can hear it, is it still dissonant? Obviously, since we can't prove the morgue

> If a duff chord is played out of hours in a full morgue where no living person can hear it, is it still dissonant? Obviously, since we can't prove the morgue isn't consciously listening to it... :p We can't prove that Napster or a counterfeit CD isn't conscious to everyone's satisfaction either, but fortunately for copyright-holders, that isn't actually how the burden of proof on a "it's just like humans learning how to perform" defence works. Legal systems deny that things that probably are conscious are human-equivalent all the time anyway, that's why you can eat or sell a cow but you can't sue it or assign copyright to it. But even if the burden of proof was reversed, an argument that an NN consisting of static values stored on disk that outputs a discrete and (similarly) static sound file on demand before returning to being static without even a state update isn't the same thing as a human mind/body constituting long-running chemical processes performing music in continuous time seems.... pretty sound.