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?

The map/territory distinction seems relevant here. Common language is not constructed within any single unique perspective.
— creativesoul

Ah, that's difficult. Basically, you (general you) need to have the map in your mind or there is no territory. You learn about the territory from the map, you create a map in your mind, and then you proceed to produce part of the territory. The metaphor doesn't quite apply here: The territory is as much dependent on the existance of the map, as the map is dependent on the territory. It's iterative. Chicken/Egg. A million maps converge to producing a territory which in turn modifies the maps ever so slightly...

There's no clear distinction here... — Dawnstorm

And yet I painstakingly set the difference out between common language and "common language". In short, the latter consists of meaningful marks, whereas the former consists of that(sometimes) and so much more(all the time).

We may be talking past one another here, on this point. It had to do with what's directly below. I may have misunderstood you.

"Common language" needs to be constructed within a unique perspective as well. — Dawnstorm

Can you rephrase this by leaving out "common language" and substituting in it's place whatever that is talking about instead?

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? — creativesoul

That's part of it. An object can't exist outside a subject-object relationship. But a thing persists when no subject is around. When we want wood from a tree, we construe the thing as object(source of wood), but it's the thing that provides the wood.

"Treeness" is more complex, since we don't come to trees naively - not knowing anything about them. And our preconceptions are always already social. So when we both see the same tree, we also already share a context of social knowledge gathering about trees. So the tree-as-object carries traces of subject-to-subject interactions about similiar objects. The tree-as-thing does not. It's the primal instigator of the object, and the subject-object interaction between me and the tree includes unreflected meaning that comes directly from the tree. It's usually overshadowed by our preconceptions and cultural usage of trees.

Can you rephrase this by leaving out "common language" and substituting in it's place whatever that is talking about instead? — creativesoul

No, because it's inherently unclear what that would even be. There is no localised language-as-thing. The parts of words that are word-as-thing are limited to the sign-body (squiggles, sounds, gestures). Language-as-thing is distributed across subjects. That is why your conception of the language you're speaking is part of the language your speaking. We're perpetuating treeness, but not the tree. In contrast, we're perpetuating both languageness (in the sense that we know that sounds, squiggles, gestures constitute language) and language. We cannot face language the way we face tree. The way we face language is more akin to the socially mediated aspects of treeness than to the immediate and primal subject to thing relation. There's a doubling of the object that doesn't occur with trees.

Ah, that's not as well put as I'd like, but I'll leave it. It's my third false start. I hope something in there is... meaningful?

That's chock full of meaning. If you'll forgive my sudden poetic license; it seems that you're setting out 'layers' of the individual significance and/or meaning that things acquire over time while becoming objects to a subject. It is an interesting avenue of thought, packed full of unique avenues.

It also seems that common language plays an important role, which surprises me given how you earlier wondered how important language was when talking about the differences between language less creatures' thought/belief and our own.

I'm still pretty much thinking that most everything you've been explaining dovetails nicely into my own understanding/position regarding how things become meaningful to a creature so capable. It's the sheer quantity of correlations drawn between different things.

Are there any obvious(to you anyway, given I'm interpreting your words) misunderstandings above?

Are there any obvious(to you anyway, given I'm interpreting your words) misunderstandings above? — creativesoul

That seems just about right. I'm a little careful about this:

It also seems that common language plays an important role, which surprises me given how you earlier wondered how important language was when talking about the differences between language less creatures' thought/belief and our own. — creativesoul

I don't deny that language plays an important role. I'm not sure, though, when we're going for species comparison, we know enough about the role to make a species distinction over it. For example, if we attribute to language a function or role that really is due to a lower-level shared-meaning process (something any social speceis might be capable of), then we could either overestimate the role language plays, or underestimate the degree to which other species are language-capable. (And to what degree is this either/or a language-induced false dichotomy? Two approaches to the same question?)