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by IAmBroom 293 days ago
Autistic people have in part answered that question. Some of them feel actual pain at unwanted touches or undesirable textures.

Pain, like vision, resides in the brain; like vision it is mostly determined by reports from our (non-brain) nervous system, but pain, light flashes, even objects and people can be created whole-cloth by the brain itself. And "real" inputs can be ignored, like a mild pain you're desensitized to, or the gorilla walking amongst the ball-passers in that video.