You can think different things, but you can never think things differently.
‘The things thought are different’ does not mean ‘things are thought differently.’
I think you can think of the same thing differently. You may change your mind about a thing, or it may be a puzzle that you are trying to solve, which requires different approaches in thinking to solve it (basically, thinking about it in different ways).
Whether the thing itself becomes different when you start thinking about it differently is good question. Say, a person is an asshole and you think of him as an asshole. Later, you get to know him and realize he’s really a nice guy, and now you think of him as actually a pretty cool dude. Now that your thinking is different, is he a different thing now? Or is he a same thing now, but your thinking is different? Are you thinking differently about the same thing, or is it now a different thing completely and your thinking is adjusted because this thing is now different?
p.s.
Just to clarify: The statement " the things thought are different" means basically, “thinking about different things”
and the statement: “things are thought differently” basically means “thinking differently about one particular thing”
Basically, you’re saying that your brain doesn’t change, but what the brain thinks about does. Being the physicality I think I am, I can’t help but disagree. As I see it, thinking different things is the effect of thinking differently. To put it crudely, for a lack of being able to put it in any other way, shit goes on in the brain to make you think about B, and different shit goes on which results in you thinking of B. If you brain did not change, the contents of your thinking wouldn’t change.
So the structure of thoughts remains the same, while the content can differ. If you believe that we think in sentences then I agree. If you believe that thoughts are reducible to physical states of the brain, then I agree with you, but a little less, but only about the content being able to differ. Am I on the right track here? Or were you talking about something completely different?
Your blue is not necessarily my blue.
Your feeling of sad is not necessarily my feeling of sad. It may be close. But I somewhat doubt it is the Same.
I got around to this in http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=165022 a bit.
I don’t agree with the OP. I agree with this instead:
You can’t think things differently as readily as you can think different things.
How we think versus what we think? Yes, we can change how we think, at least to some extent.