I’ve always wondered how exactly pain does it’s job. To me the definition of pain has always seemed to be self referencing. What makes the sensation unpleasant and how does the brain know what unpleasant is?
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Pain is a signal like any other sensation. Your nerves react to unpleasant stimuli and alerts the body to it.
Pain is just a signal you’re taking damage, you think of it as unpleasant because some distant evolutionary ancestors wired their brain to treat signals from these particular nerves as unpleasant.
And because taking damage is generally a bad thing for survival those who tried to avoid it survived more often, those who treated these signals as a good thing died out and they’re not our ancestors.
“People feel pain when specific nerves called nociceptors detect tissue damage and transmit information about the damage along the spinal cord to the brain. For example, touching a hot surface will send a message through a reflex arc in the spinal cord and cause an immediate contraction of the muscles.”
[source](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/145750#:~:text=People%20feel%20pain%20when%20specific,immediate%20contraction%20of%20the%20muscles.)
Basically, sharp thing breaks skin, tiny little sensors feel this break and send that information to the brain, the brain recognizes this signal as bad and in turn sends a reaction to this signal which makes you investigate what is making this feeling
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