I'll also give you a concrete example of how our sense of touch operates: there is a known phenomenon which manifests if you twist your tongue upside down.

When your tongue is twisted, touching the left side of it feels like the other side is being touched, and vice versa.

I will link a better source later, but for an explanation of the phenomenon:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6cpgqb/eli5_if_i_flip_my_tongue_upsidedown_and_touch_it/

If touch was processed locally and existed within the affected body part, things like this wouldn't be possible.

Instead, stuff like this happens because the brain isn't perfect and doesn't always map things accurately. In this case, due to the way nerves are arranged in the tongue, the brain mistakes their location when the tongue is twisted and incorrectly maps the feeling.

There is also such a thing as the minimal distance for which two objects can be told apart when they're touching the skin. Like a minimal touch resolution. That happens because of density of nerve endings inside the skin, and if our feeling of being touched originated in and of itself, inside the part that's being touched rather than the brain, this likely wouldn't happen either.

a body part can't FEEL anything by itself. The very reasons why we can feel things on our body is because our brain maps the feelings to the correct body part. That doesn't go for pain only. Even just touch. A body part by itself can't feel anything, because feel is produced in the brain and mapped onto the body so we can recognize where the signaling originates from. This is like, biology 101? I am not making anything up. It's the way things are.

And please, don't employ such logical fallacies as appealing to common sense to make me sound like a fool. I am waiting for you to disprove what I claimed by providing me with evidence that pain "exists" somewhere but in our brain, regardless of where we feel it.

I've already addressed the problem with the language you've used to discuss it. You've yet to have given those replies their just due. — creativesoul

You're correct as the fact that I've missed a lot of posts. I am not home and browsing on my phone is difficult, so it's easy to miss answers. As soon as I get home I will read everything that I left behind and answer in detail.

For instance, I've never denied the need for a central nervous system, or a brain, in order to feel pain in your foot... or, if you prefer... at the damage site. — creativesoul

I have stated that the signaling of pain takes place at the damage site, and the pain is later processed and thus experienced in the brain. I stand by my statement. The fact that we perceive pain in the foot doesn't contradict what I say. Until you disprove what I said with a checked source that claims pain physically resides in the local site rather than inside the brain, I will stand by my statement.

https://www.everydayhealth.com/pain-management/how-pain-works.aspx
I guess everyone is making things up on the net, and pain exists locally as some weird ghost that inhabits a single body part. That's just a source but feel free to open and read every other result of the search "how pain works."

I bet you any amount that you can get your foot hammered 22 times, and you won't feel much pain without a brain, as well.

You aren't making much sense here and you're fixating on a small detail out of a 500+ word thread.

I'm not taking anything personally by the way. I'm actually amused by the fact that you are straight up making up facts just for the sake of arguing with me about the minutia rather than actually tackling the big picture.

Cool

there are multiple instances in which we can't trust our perception, from optical illusions to all the scenarios I mentioned in my previous posts. If you fail to see how our perception isn't flawless and doesn't account for everything there actually going on, I'm afraid that's on you. Once again, the tone I'm inferring from your posts isn't that of someone that wants to constructively discuss. Do you just want to argue?

I think that you and I can drop it here. Let's agree to disagree.

it's not. The nerves in your foot signal to your brain that a body part is being damaged, your CNS processes the signal, and you experience pain. Your brain "maps" it to your foot, because the reason we feel pain to being with is to warn you of something going wrong and it wouldn't be very useful if we felt pain without being able to tell where the issue is, but it's your brain that's experiencing the pain. Your foot can't "feel" anything

Where have I gone wrong? — creativesoul

I don't think pain is "in your foot," to begin with.

I might be wrong, but it feels to me like you're really trying to find something wrong in my questions at all costs. That's fine, don't get me wrong. Criticism is important.

I'll try and explain my reasoning in the simplest terms, as it's easier to spot fallacies when everything is laid out in a simple way.

Every organism's perception is different. Not all the living beings have the same set of senses, not every being interprets stimuli the same way, and even among species that share some senses, they aren't "set up" the same way. They vary in the range of perceivable "values," and how strong the perception is. Our sight is "stronger" than our "smell." I hope it's clear what I mean here.

So, since the way every being perceives reality differently, it appears to me that reality can't be traced down to being exactly equal to one's perception. It has to be something different, independent of any one's perception. Add to that the fact that anything we'll ever experience is a byproduct of our perception, because we think and feel through processing external data captured by our sensory organs.

So (1) reality is independent of our perception, (2) we all perceive things differently, (3) therefore any one's individual perception can't be flawless because it's clear from (1)-(2) that if a given individual's perception was perfect, then what's perceived by that individual is equal to reality. But even assuming that one individual perceives reality 100% flawlessly, then everyone else's still is flawed because it's different.

As a consequence to (3), perception doesn't seem to be reliable model of representation of reality. All we know is perception is flawed (it necessarily lacks something, or we would perceive infinite things at a given time), so what guarantee do we have that reality isn't entirely different than the small piece of it we can grasp?

We can only see x% of the photon wavelengths (colors) and only hear y% of the sound frequencies. Do you agree that the world would feel a lot different if we cold see and hear everything? Yet it actually IS like that, even if we're constantly missing a big chunk of it.

then what is "what's perceived"? I might be wrong but I think I clarified what I meant each time I said that. What's perceived can't be something absolute because everyone's perception is slightly (or very) different.

okay, take my initial example of electromagnetic fields. Some animals can sense them, whereas we know they exist thanks to science and the tools we use to measure them. We don't have a body part that lets us perceive them or work out their existence. Dogs have a very strong sense of smell, so they perceive things we don't notice. And their underdeveloped sight doesn't let them see things as clearly, so they might miss out on something and their perception of reality is surely different than ours.

So if we put reality and perception into a two-way relationship where one implies the other, whose perception are we using as the model? Does it make sense to do so?

Thank you for the post, Samuele. You are a very bright young man. — Noah Te Stroete

Thank you man, I appreciate it.

If this were all that emotions, feelings, and thoughts were for, then how do you explain philosophy? What survival advantage does philosophy have? — Noah Te Stroete

I think sometimes the mechanisms that keep us alive and moving forward (evolving) aren't immediately understandable by us. Nature does some things that sound weird and counterintuitive, but when you study into them, they make sense.

Take love for example. It's just a powerful and complex feeling, yet at the core of it, I think it's an abstraction our mind uses to drag us together with another individual and, ultimately, procreate. This might be controversial but the theory of evolution seems to agree with me, as far as what science says currently.

What if philosophy is another construct our brains used to "push" evolution into a specific route? Being introspective, something that characterizes our species, has shaped some of our traits and directly affects our actions and decisions. There are still some things this "theory" can't explain, but I thought maybe it's a good starting point?

because someone blind can't see that tree, and a person with schizophrenia might see a car instead of a tree. Who's right?

don't electromagnetic fields affect us too, though? Birds seem to be able to use them to tell which way is north etc., while flying. I'm not sure about the specifics, but it should be something like that.

Why aren't we able to tell which way is north by just "feeling it"? I'll answer the rest of your post more in detail when I get home, and explain my reasoning.

perceiving an infinite number of things would take infinitely long. — Echarmion

But aren't we perceiving multiple stimulae simultaneously already? When you hear and see something at the same time, it doesn't take longer to process those two just because it's two different senses. You can feel someone touching your hand even while you're tasting something.

Wouldn't a brain with infinitely much processing power be able to perceive infinitely many things (or stimulae coming from infinitely many "senses") simultaneously?

thank you for pointing out! It took me some time to write all of that, and when I went to copy and paste everything together I must have messed something up.

What do you think of the topic I raised in my post by the way?