I very much appreciate your comment, and at the same time am interested to challenge this idea of "the illusion of music". What about music is an illusion? Mayb

I very much appreciate your comment, and at the same time am interested to challenge this idea of "the illusion of music". What about music is an illusion? Maybe this was just an unfortunate phrasing, and yet it might touch on the heart of the matter. Music is a language of relationships, indeed it is nothing but relationships, in time, pitch, timbre, volume, voice, number and so on, non-symbolic and changing relationships of sound carrying aesthetic and emotional feeling and meaning. It is both objective and subjective -- objective in the sense that "4 + 4 = 8" is an undeniably more beautiful statement than "4 + 4 = 6", and subjective in the sense that you and I may have different favorite numbers and also we may react differently to various medications or prefer different foods. Music is external and internal, social and individual. What it is not ever is an illusion as then it would not exist. (It may express illusion, or become more like a creator of illusions, for example when the orchestra tries to conjure up the illusion of a thunder storm.) Now, one might be tempted to counter that the kind of "meaning" music carries is itself an illusion, an epiphenomenon maybe, but then why should one care about anything at all, including AGI, since the kind of meaning that music carries is the same as the meaning of love, of hate, of good and bad, pains and pleasures, and hopes and regrets, tragedies and successes? Maybe a reason for calling music an illusion is to try to point out that it's all in our heads. Sure, the physical instruments are over there, but they are just some atoms and molecules rattling about creating vibrations that, like everything ultimately, share the meaninglessness of the physical universe of just more material stuff (ignoring the quantum and the unknown). In which case though life seems also to look more like an illusion. Ah but the meaningless vibrations enter our ears and are processed and become music, so like color there is none but in our heads, thus illusion? But these notions also fall apart. The redness of apples isn't all in our heads; it requires a certain relationship to light frequencies that we see as redness. It's not an illusion it's just what red looks like through a living human body. If not through our senses and brain, and then mind, where should we experience it? Music is only ever meaningless if it is unheard, as apples can only not be red when they are unseen (or are Granny Smiths). So music is only meaningless if there is nobody -- no body -- to listen. And maybe that's where all of this leads. Your AGI needs to be embodied and alive.