But, the processes involved in creating these sensations are typically objective in the important sense that they are results of impersonal nature. We smell, taste, hear, see and feel cuts and bruises whether we like it or not. We can not will sensations away, even if some of us ignore pain better than others. True, some unwanted thoughts are hard to get rid of, but the control we have over thought is not comparable to the lack of control we have over intense sensations. Sensations tie us to that material world that resists our preferences, and in that fundamental sense, they are performing an objective function.
Sensations are our subjective experience of the objective stimuli that make up our environments.
Unlike ideas, they are linked to these stimuli by impersonal, cause and effect, determinate chains. This is why we can not will them away or change them as easily as we can intangible ideas. Perception can be seen as objective or subjective, depending on whether we want to emphasize its impartiality, or whether we focus on the fact that it creates the private experience of the individual, differing from one person to the next. In the final analysis, it is both. To make the objective, determinate character of causal links between sensation and stimuli clear to my students, I often purchase the largest balloons I can find to blow up in class.