I’m seeing two related questions in this.
To be more exact here, the object acting on your senses such that you experience it in the form of a red apple, is a process of selective focus. You are able to regard the one thing as a unique specific entity from the rest of your field of view. You regard the red apple in the dish of fruit on the table in the dining room apart from everything else.
A budding chemist or physicist might like to tell you, and in one sense they would be right, that the red apple you are perceiving is a collection of molecules comprised of atoms, made of electrons and protons, etc., This knowledge is not solely derived from the red apple, This is a specialize study within concepts of materials, and needs to be considered on its own merit.
Making this distinction helps to distinguish between the different orders observed within the order, as I am observing it.
Act of selective focus? Percepts are automatic forms of awareness. There’s nothing we can select about them. The term “to focus or not” belongs to the conceptual level of awareness. Nothing to do with perception.
And as for the atoms, its just the equivalent story to what I described earlier:
“There is an amount of things (i.e. one or more objects) of such a kind that, if I were small enough and had those microsopically little senses equivalent to the large ones I have right now, and when that amount of things was to act on those micro-senses, I would perceive those things in the form of an atom.”
Observe that whether we are talking about perceiving apples or just single atoms - it seems we can never actually know for certain whether what we perceive as an “entity” through our senses is actually a coherent object independent of our senses. The “entity-effect” produced by the interaction of external objects with our senses might theoretically be caused by multiple and completely separate objects. In other words, from a multitude of sources all bombarding our senses at once, so the result just happens to be “a tree” while in reality, there are five, six, or a hundred external objects involved that produce that “tree” in interaction with our senses.
Maybe the latter isn’t a realistic thing to happen, because the separate objects should stimulate our senses in separately identifiable concentrations/intensities so we can still keep them apart. But then again, our sensual aparatus might as well be able to neutralize that through its own structure. Or the mere fact that the external objects interact with our senses all at once might mix the whole thing up into one thing already.
Observe also what the whole object-means-form chain of perception means: It means that everything we are currently not perceiving live can be identified only on a would-be basis. For example, if your mum tells you on the phone that dad is just jumping to the ceiling out of joy for the birthday gift you send him, what does that mean? It means that whatever you are doing in your mind to imagine that scene doesn’t actually exist in that form. It is only if you were there right now to see it, only then, would there actually be dad jumping to the ceiling. So long as you are just listening to mum on the phone, there are just certain objects doing certain stuff that would be dad jumping to the ceiling, if only you were there. It is only like a potentiality, not an actuality. Not really happening like I’m imagining it. Just happening right now in some form unknowable to me.
Given this background, out there in New York, there is no such thing as the “Empire State Building” as I know it - only certain objects that would be the Empire State Building for me if I saw it. No such thing as a meteorite approaching earth about to hit me - only certain objects that will soon become a meteorite doing that to me once I get to stare at it in fear. One could say the same about the Vikings beating the Patriots seen on TV or about listening to Roosevelt’s infamy speech on radio living during WW2.
The object-means-form chain allows us to protect us from foreseable harm - but it doesn’t allow us to enjoy the existence of pleasant events outside of our field of view. As I said, everything outside of our current field of view can be identified on a would-be basis only. And this - by the way - makes it all the more important to have other people around in remote places, so at least they can create some actuality to those things by perceiving them.