If we contextualise thoughts with the physical senses (mind can be considered the sense of thought), we can see when discomfort is felt how the mind reacts with psychological aversion. That aversion manifests as a new sensation, bodily tension or what have you, to which the mind again psychologically reacts, feels, reacts, feels, in a loop. Thus, it is not thought itself that causes other thoughts, but an interface at which mind becomes matter and matter becomes mind.

On your view, when we look out into the yard at the red oak, do we see a tree or our perception of the tree? I'm just curious.
— creativesoul

I find that question confusing. You can't see a perception. "Seeing a tree" is perception. Visual perception. That involves a lot of things and includes stuff that happens quite a bit away from your body, such as light travelling from the tree to your retina. So from the light hitting the tree to our brain processing nerve signals we have a dynamic system. — Dawnstorm

Okay. Good. Our positions may not be as far apart as I thought earlier. I've no issue with any of that.

I'm fine saying we see a tree, but I'm unsure we attach the same meaning to that clause. — Dawnstorm

Right.

Saying we see the perception of a tree feels like a meta-level transgression. — Dawnstorm

Agreed.

Since the terms here are... tricky and I don't need to phrase that to myself I'm not confident I can fully explain. Maybe like this? I believe there's a thing out there that becomes an object when a subject faces it. So when we both see the same tree we see the same thing but not the same object. And treeness is part of the object rather than the thing, but the thing restricts what qualities can attach to the object. Sorry if this is confusing, but I don't think there's an easy way to phrase this.

I certainly can't answer your question with a multiple-choice tick. — Dawnstorm

No worries.

I cannot see how "when we both see the same tree, we see the same thing, but not the same object" avoids self-contradiction on its face, unless the object is neither thing nor tree.

What additional work is "object" doing here? I mean how does it help explain anything more than talk of trees? It clearly is supposed to be referring to something different than the tree. What is "object" picking out of this world to the exclusion of all else? I see you've said that "treeness" is part of this "object". It seems that this notion of "treeness" - on my view - amounts to the meaningfulness that the tree has to the subject; this is akin to the matness of the mat in the earlier cat/mouse/mat example.

Would you agree that we see the same thing, the same tree, and that tree is meaningful to each of us?

The differences would be in the meaning we've attributed to the tree. <-----does that fill in this notion of "object". The object includes the meaning we've attributed to the tree, whereas the tree does not?