The topic of perceptions has been thrown backwards and forwards so much that it has made some people sick due to overuse. Nevertheless the topic yields some great fruits if addressed in a sensible manner.
Perceptions are a simple concept defined as 'knowledge gained via the senses'. To expand on this, the human mind cannot understand or acknowledge anything unless it receives input about that thing. The method of input is, quite simply via the senses be they sight, touch or any other sense that one may believe exists. Think of the sense as a keyboard for your computer.
A computer cannot understand the input from a keyboard straight out, so the input goes through a keyboard controller and is converted into a form that the computer understands. This is essentially what happens before the brain can process information. The raw data is converted into perceptions which the brain can handle.
The benefits of this process are that it allows the brain to be much more simple than it would have to be in order to understand the raw data as it stands. It also helps the brain to make decisions rapidly, such as the fear reaction of screaming when an annoying friend startles you.
The trade offs are that the perceptions that are formed are not very accurate and are most often misunderstood. Any number of perceptions may represent the same thing, yet at the same time put forward what appear to be diametrically opposed ideas which are hard to incorporate and often lead to misunderstandings and mindless arguments.
At this point I would like to introduce two terms. One depicts a theoretical concept, known as the 'objective', whilst the other, the 'subjective' is a concept that I shall introduce now.
If we go back to our analogy of the computer, the raw data from the input is what may be considered as the objective. When the raw data is converted so that the computer understands it, this data no longer exists as objective, but becomes subjective. In the example of the human brain, objects and entities exist in the objective. The only way that the human brain can understand and acknowledge these objects/entities is to receive an input from or about them and to form a subjective understanding, or perception, of the object/entity. This has benefits and drawbacks including those discussed earlier.
Words and titles are just some of the tools that we use to create and represent our subjective perceptions and due to their subjective nature, it is not very easy to use them to represent the objective accurately. What may suffice as a description of the objective for one person is more than likely going to be nowhere near sufficient for another person. This is due to the reason that each persons' mind operates slightly differently and will find comfort in a different way of explaining things using a particular expression.
The manner of thought which I find most effective can be compared to the vision of a fly. The fly uses a multilayer vision comprising thousands of individual images in order to build up a more accurate view of something, so theoretically by collecting and assimilating as many subjective perceptions as one can will help a person in finding an overall perception that more people will understand as a representation of the subjective. Nonetheless some will reject these ideas based upon principal and that is their choice for which they should have made their own choice, lest they become an autonomous robot.
The reason that the objective exists as a theoretical concept is that it in itself cannot be perceived. Understanding the objective through subjective perceptions is a contradiction in terms. As a result, the existence of the objective is probably more debatable than a great number of concepts. This is also partly due to the fact that one cannot understand, nor convey their understanding of the objective by using the mannerisms that they have become accustomed to. As to how the objective can be understood? Well that in itself is another story.