Well you did not analyze my post. 
Even an analytic mind gets bogged down especially in this age. Data pounds brains like never before. We are not training brains to clean up data, just to store data.
Define a tree without resorting to ideas about what it is like or is not like.
âRose is a rose is a rose.ââGertrude Stein.
There is a personal relationship between I and it, regardless of whether the it is a thing or an idea.
Analytics does not obscure this relationship; it merely puts in on a more abstract level of interpretation.
What is a tree to me is important to me. What a tree is in and of itself is not.
Well here is another example of a poor definition:
That says that the definition of a tree, the categorical qualifier for being a tree is that something be âa woody perennial plantâ. That means that ALL woody perennial plants are trees. The fact that they typically have a single stem is irrelevant to the definition. Those vines along your fence are actually trees.
The second use of the word implies that any and all wooden structures or parts of wooden structures are trees. So that writing utensil that you thought was a pencil is actually a tree ⌠and that desk ⌠and that chair ⌠and that frame around the picture ⌠and the floor ⌠and basically anything that has wood.
One only defines words and their concepts, not the item itself.
You define âtreeâ, not a tree.
Without mutually understood definitions communication would be impossible. I understand that a tree is not a vine.
I once asked my class to define tree. What I got were personal opinions from those who actually had some experience with trees. Take away the personal response and you are left with rote dictionary definitions. On the personal side, I know what a maple tree looks like because of having seen its leaves and bark.
I may be wrong, but I sense you are asking for an impersonal definition of what a tree actually is. I can only relate my experience with trees in hopes that others have had the same or similar experience.
duplicate
True and thus definitions are critically important to society.
âŚyet that dictionary doesnât seem to know that. 
I have no intention of derailing the thread James. Carry on.
It just fascinates me how folks like you can post threads relating to the parameters of the analytical mind [in the philosophy forum], the parameters of a particular political prejudice [in the society, government and economic forum], and the parameters of God [in the religion and spirituality forum], and yet seem neither willing nor able to create a thread where the three aims [and the three sets of definitions] are intertwined so as to explore that which is of most interest to me here: how, using the tools of philosophy, we might come to grasp â grasp in the most optimal manner â âhow one ought to liveâ in interacting with others out in a particular world construed from particular points of view that come into conflict.
âAll I want you to do is teach me to see without me having to open my eyes!!â
The problem with this definition for me, right off the bat is that human conscious does not have being independent of itself and would therefore not exist. We have to work in the adverb âespeciallyâ somehow and perhaps this acts as some kind of loophole, but itâs a messy definition.
But James, what would your definition of existence be?
That which affects. (?)
It is difficult for me to make a distinction between definition of a thing or idea and description of what it is like.
Thatâs it. Or âaffects upon affectsâ, âAffectanceâ. It just depends on your nuance of intent.
Of course the Webster definition of consciousness did not mean independent in the way you took it. They meant âindependent of being conscious ofâ. So they could have worded it a bit more precisely. The problem is that all they said was that existence is objective. That is like defining an apple by saying that it is red. They still didnât say what it is.
Itâs a specfic kind of description, I would say. A description is generally a collection of true assertions about X. That collection of assertions could serve various purposes and be complete or incomplete or completely useful for some uses. A definition must clearly set limits around X, so that we know what âthingsâ can be considered X and what things are not X.
You could spend ten pages describing dogs - using some random organic chemistry, facts like they block sunlight when held in front of your face, displace water when lowered into a tank, etc. - and not have defined âdogâ in the right way to distinguish dogs from cats. Or if you take out the organic chem, which distinguished dogs from bowling balls.
Since you are generally not defining something just in distinction from one other thing, but rather all other things, you donât define at least only in the negative. So you will use description as the core of a definition.
yeah, I was being a bit playful with Websterâs there. I canât expect Websterâs to be philosophically clean, but if your rephrasing is right, then we are getting close to things that exist need not have affectance. The ding an sichs must be out there, but need not impinge. Which is not to say one need be a phenomenalist to center on affectance. I just think they should avoid taking one specific philosophical stance. To be fair, I am not sure of what a short elegant way of avoiding this would be like.
I donât see how you got that, but isnât terribly relevant.
And then you will define what it means for someone to âopen their eyesâ and they will [eventually] come to understand that this means to think about these things exactly like you do.
Indeed, that is what makes you a run of the mill objectivist, James.
.
The effectiveness of a definition appears to depend on the mutual understanding between the person who would define and the person who would ask for a definition as to the possibility of an experience with the thing or idea to be explained. I cannot explain what is meant by the color blue to a person who has been born blind. I can describe an apple, however, because the person I would explain that to can touch and taste.
duplicate
I would assume, then, that you, James, do not adhere to Wittengensteinâs family resemblance definitions and in fact think that all the key words in language, necessary to make the main useful assertions and draw the correct conclusions can be decultured and clarified - despite being human artifacts not generated in this way - to the point that no ambiguities or filter biases are present, and all even inherent dead metaphors - say those produced given that motor cortex âviewpointsâ saturate much abstraction, even -
and that the RM is a product of such a distillation
now purified of cultural, even perhaps mammalian, time bound subjective biases?
That it is completely unmetaphorical or at least all metaphors are utterly transparant and function as literal
such that say, any intelligent organism, regardless of biology or culture, would agree, perhaps after training.
Nagelâs bat, should it evolve into a similar intelligence level, despite having built its metaphors and models more on sonar than vision
even species that have different time experiences - intelligent rhizomes, colonies, patterns not based in our organic chemistry at all with very different life cycles and âŚwell, you get the idea⌠-
would, given time, recognize the same truth in RM or could or should.
That it is objective even in English.
About Nagelâs batâecholocation was used in WWII to find the whereabouts of enemy subs. So donât we know something of what it means to be a bat? Again, E. O. Wilson does a good job of describing for us what it is like to be a bee in refutation of Nagelâs idea that we can never know. Bat and bee are organisms designed to survive. Consequently their ability to interact with environments in order to survive shows some sense of objectivity. The difference between these organisms and us appears to be our consciousness of Self, which may be necessary to give us options on how to adapt to environments.
That we have such options does not negate the possibility of our understanding what another organism is like. So we explain things and ideas always in terms of ourselves.