thanks to the unfortunate persistence of dualism—the outdated belief that the mind and body are separate—people often equate subjective with woolly, and psychological with imagined. This is harmfully wrong. It’s not the case that nociception is a physical process of the body, while pain is a psychological process of the mind. Both arise from the firing of neurons. It’s just that in humans, nociception can be confined to the peripheral nervous system, while with pain, the brain is always involved. Pain requires some degree of conscious awareness. Nociception can exist without it.
