If I understand you correctly, what you're asking is this: does the act of seeing a tree with your own eyes give you the same kind of experience that the act of, say, visualizing a tree does?

If that's what you're asking, the answer is no. There's a clear difference between the two kinds of experience. Visualization lacks the richness that seeing with your own eyes has.

But suppose that this weren't the case. Suppose that they were equally rich. Suppose that visualizing a tree was just as clear as seeing it with your own eyes. Would that make visualization non-mental? Of course not. This is because whether something is mental or not depends on context. You need to look at how your experience relates to what was in the past. It is this relation, which is never complete, because past is not finite, that determines to what degree what you're looking at is either mental or non-mental.

-Magnus Anderson

Visualization can be as rich as what one sees "with their own eyes", or more so - and isn't it the aim and mark of a finely developed mind to see "with one's own eyes" as if it were both visualized and physical reality? Ie. the visionary's sight.