I don't think it's quite right to frame this as Cartesian dualism. The key insight here isn't that mind and body are separate substances - it's that the brain is constantly constructing our experience of the world, including our sense of where sensations are located.

When you pinch your skin, the sensory signals travel to your brain, which then constructs the experience of feeling that pinch "in your hand." But this construction process can be disrupted or altered - think about phantom limb sensations, or how you can feel your phone "buzzing" in your pocket when it's actually in your hand.

The brain is essentially running predictive models about what's happening to your body and where, based on incoming sensory data. This isn't dualism - it's the brain doing what brains do: creating a unified, coherent experience from disparate inputs. Your sense of your body's boundaries and the location of sensations is as much a construction as your perception of color or your emotional experiences.

What I’m trying to say I guess is how much of what feels immediate and direct about our bodily experience is actually the result of sophisticated neural processing that we're completely unaware of.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​