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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kelleris" data-source="post: 2000904" data-attributes="member: 19130">It looks to me as though there's a basic confusion here between a metaphor and an argument from analogy.A metaphor is a sort of illustrative gloss that overlays something else, in an effort to help you understand the thing being looked at.  So you need two terms, and they have to be related in some significant way.  Importantly, they can be completely different in every other significant way.  A metaphor like "my love is like a red, red rose" works (erm, kinda) because the rose element illustrates some one feature of love.  This does not change the fact that love is not a plant, not colored, not a physical thing, and so forth.  So the terms of a metaphor can be pretty dissimilar - it's more of an aid to our intuitions about a thing than an argument per se.On this view, the Matrix as an element of a metaphor with (I gather, haven't read the stupid movie thread) the real world works as long as it lends some of its intelligibility to the real world.  If you come out of the theater wondering if reality isn't something deeper, beyond mere appearances, then the Matrix has metaphored properly (and you need to read some Plato).  If you don't then it didn't work for you.  It is possible that the craptacular backstory is the reason it didn't work for you; maybe you just demand more overlay in your metaphors.An argument from analogy, on the other hand, uses the Matrix and the real world as sorts of premises - "the real world and the Matrix world are similar in X significant ways, ergo we can assume that the real world may also be similar to the Matrix world in Y way."  This is like a metaphor, but it's less of a "gloss" or "way of seeing" and more of an argument.  If you don't think that the Matrix world and the real world are similar in X significant ways, the whole thing just doesn't work.  This sort of thinking is much more likely to be bothered by craptacular backstory, I think.Another aspect is that the historical progression to the Matrix world doesn't need to be a significant factor in some arguments from analogy.  Maybe you think the humans of the movies are very well characterized, and can tell you something about real-world humans.  This is the sense in which we can learn about people via an argument from analogy out of Tolkien, or what have you.  In this case, the backstory of the Matrix world is not terribly significant.So, Felix, my answer is that we need to know whether you find the metaphor faulty (i.e., it doesn't illuminate your intuitions about the subject it is paired with in the metaphor, the real world in this case), or the argument from analogy poor (i.e., the Matrix movies are too dissimilar to be good subjects for the argument from analogy).  If, as I suspect, it's the latter, you should tell us what conclusion you think the movies wanted us to draw before we can properly evaluate whether or not they have a good case.</blockquote>

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