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iPod Shuffle: Philosophical Quandry

L

lanray

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 18, 2005
238
3
I recently parted with my 3G 10Gig iPod and purchased a refurb 512MB Shuffle. It was a great move for me; I listen to the same #$@% songs over and over, and now I can do so with a little machine that sounds and looks great.

I thought I wouldn't like the "shuffle" feature. I'm kind of a type A, control-freak sort of person. Yesterday, though, I enjoyed the randomness of shuffle. Kind of nice to let go of the music selection process. A new freedom!

Then, I was fasty-forwarding and rewinding through the selections, and I noticed that it was playing the songs in the same order. NOT RANDOM! Then, I wondered what algorithm Apple uses for "random" - anybody know?

THEN, I was thinking that if I were that type of person, I'd sue Apple for false advertising. Of course, I'd only sue for a Video iPod and lunch with Steve, his treat.

THEN, I started to have an existential-ethical fit. If my touted Shuffle isn't random, with all its randomness, is anything random? Are we all predetermined, just like our Shuffle? If so, then there's no point to random, no point to decisions, it's already in the cards. If that's so, then there's no culpability, no true success - I'm just a product of somebody's algorithm.

If I were to sue over this, it'd probably be worth a MBP and a nice dinner with Steve and his kin, his treat. You know, for emotional suffering.

Then I had to go to work. Nothing random in that :p
 
Josh

Josh

macrumors 68000
Mar 4, 2004
1,640
1
State College, PA
iTunes will do that too.

If you have it on random, play some songs, which will be randomly selected one by one, and then rewind back to the first, and play though again, it will play the same order through all the songs you have heard.

Once you listen to the last song you previously heard before rewinding, it will select a new song, at random.

It just "remembers" a short list of the last played songs, and if you rewind, it will go through your list again, until it doesn't have a song in the list, then it selects a random one.
 
L

lanray

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 18, 2005
238
3
Slept well, actually

Got enough sleep, really. I just remembered this, though: I was listening to Rush's "Freewill" yesterday when all this came to my head. "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice", and, "I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose freewill." Oh, poor Neil Peart, how was he to know that even his choice was predetermined?
 
Deepdale

Deepdale

macrumors 68000
May 4, 2005
1,965
0
New York
lanray said:
If I were to sue over this, it'd probably be worth a MBP and a nice dinner with Steve ... You know, for emotional suffering.
Click to expand...

Of course, some compensation is warranted ... your inner turmoil is readily apparent and, besides, this is America - land of the free, home of the litigious.
 
Scarlet Fever

Scarlet Fever

macrumors 68040
Jul 22, 2005
3,262
0
Bookshop!
i can tell you like coffee :D

I quite often use my iPod as a shuffle. I wish it was, sometimes... like the many times i accidentally drop it on concrete from about 3-4 feet... im lucky it hasnt given up the ghost yet
 
Alasta

Alasta

macrumors regular
Jan 12, 2005
176
0
Wellington, New Zealand
My understanding of how the Shuffle works is that it arranges all of your songs into a random order, and repeatedly plays them in that same order until you either load different songs onto it through iTunes, or tell it to 'reshuffle'. If my memory serves me correctly, you can order a reshuffle by pressing the play/pause button rapidly three times.
 
Must.Get.nano!

Must.Get.nano!

macrumors regular
Sep 12, 2005
118
0
lanray said:
I recently parted with my 3G 10Gig iPod and purchased a refurb 512MB Shuffle. It was a great move for me; I listen to the same #$@% songs over and over, and now I can do so with a little machine that sounds and looks great.

I thought I wouldn't like the "shuffle" feature. I'm kind of a type A, control-freak sort of person. Yesterday, though, I enjoyed the randomness of shuffle. Kind of nice to let go of the music selection process. A new freedom!

Then, I was fasty-forwarding and rewinding through the selections, and I noticed that it was playing the songs in the same order. NOT RANDOM! Then, I wondered what algorithm Apple uses for "random" - anybody know?

THEN, I was thinking that if I were that type of person, I'd sue Apple for false advertising. Of course, I'd only sue for a Video iPod and lunch with Steve, his treat.

THEN, I started to have an existential-ethical fit. If my touted Shuffle isn't random, with all its randomness, is anything random? Are we all predetermined, just like our Shuffle? If so, then there's no point to random, no point to decisions, it's already in the cards. If that's so, then there's no culpability, no true success - I'm just a product of somebody's algorithm.

If I were to sue over this, it'd probably be worth a MBP and a nice dinner with Steve and his kin, his treat. You know, for emotional suffering.

Then I had to go to work. Nothing random in that :p
Click to expand...


For the title..
Not everybody watches Frasier
 
eXan

eXan

macrumors 601
Jan 10, 2005
4,731
63
Russia
lanray said:
I recently parted with my 3G 10Gig iPod and purchased a refurb 512MB Shuffle. It was a great move for me; I listen to the same #$@% songs over and over, and now I can do so with a little machine that sounds and looks great.

I thought I wouldn't like the "shuffle" feature. I'm kind of a type A, control-freak sort of person. Yesterday, though, I enjoyed the randomness of shuffle. Kind of nice to let go of the music selection process. A new freedom!

Then, I was fasty-forwarding and rewinding through the selections, and I noticed that it was playing the songs in the same order. NOT RANDOM! Then, I wondered what algorithm Apple uses for "random" - anybody know?

THEN, I was thinking that if I were that type of person, I'd sue Apple for false advertising. Of course, I'd only sue for a Video iPod and lunch with Steve, his treat.

THEN, I started to have an existential-ethical fit. If my touted Shuffle isn't random, with all its randomness, is anything random? Are we all predetermined, just like our Shuffle? If so, then there's no point to random, no point to decisions, it's already in the cards. If that's so, then there's no culpability, no true success - I'm just a product of somebody's algorithm.

If I were to sue over this, it'd probably be worth a MBP and a nice dinner with Steve and his kin, his treat. You know, for emotional suffering.

Then I had to go to work. Nothing random in that :p
Click to expand...

I have Shuffle Songs turned on almost all the time, except for when I want to listen to the specific album. Can image my listening without it :)
 
frankblundt

frankblundt

macrumors 65816
Sep 19, 2005
1,271
0
South of the border
The problem with any generated randomness is that it's never truly random. There may indeed be no such thing as the truly random. Patterns can arise even out of chaos.

The problem Apple has is that human perception of randomness is not random either. The human brain has a hard-wired and critically important ability for pattern recognition that is always seeking to find correlations and patterns in the chaotic world around us. Much of what is described as eery coincidence can be laid at the feet of this brain function. Apple has received endless complaints about it's random shuffle not being truly random, frequently completely unjustifiably, based on the fact that, for instance, it plays the same song twice before playing every song once (which would be a spectacularly unlikely event in a random system).

As a consequence, they now have a "randomness" slider in the iTunes preferences so that you can alter the level of randomness in the shuffle choices to be more "random" (which is of course actually less so).

I realise this has nothing to do with your particular shuffle issue which was answered perfectly adequately by Alasta - just a nod to your more general existential crisis. Einstein said God does not play dice, Hawking seems to thing he does, Mohammed said all is written, whatsername from Terminator said no fate but what we make - take your pick.
 
L

lanray

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 18, 2005
238
3
Better late than never

Finally had a chance to review this thread after forgetting about it for a bit. There's, of course, an existential crisis that I believe Steve et al should compensate me for (tongue-in-cheek, but if they sent me another iPod, or the supposed April 1st iVideo, I would accept it graciously). There's another issue, and the most recent post begins to spell it out. Randomness and freedom seem more than coincidentally related vis-a-vis the Shuffle. There's something at risk ethically, here, and it lies in the more epistemological question of the possibility of randomness. I'd argue that any system we have of procuring randomness in a computer is NOT random (for obvious reasons that I'd be open to elucidating should anyone have questions). I'd go further and say that we're unable to generate randomness without engaging the system we are attempting to make random, thereby (in a kind of circular argument) imposing some sort of order. I was being a bit facetious, though, in making the assumption between moral culpability and this bit of epistemology. Just because randomness can't exist (well, in this cursory evaluation of it), doesn't mean we can't be morally culpable. Our moral correctness has it's foundation in something deeper than our ability to choose between different goods/evils. Anyone have any suggestions what that foundation should be?
 
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