 That pain is a subjective experience seems to be a truism. Given our common-sense understanding of pain, this seems to be the more dominant thread: instead of treating pains as objects of perceptual experience, it treats them as experiences themselves. Indeed it is this thread that the official scientific definition of ‘pain’ picks up and emphasizes, which was first formulated in  1979 by a committee organized by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), and has been, since then, widely accepted by the scientific community and  clinicians:[1]