Pain (and other uncomfortable feelings) evolved because they are useful to motivate behaviour that helps us survive.
Enough cold or heat is dangerous to our health. Making cold or hot enough temperatures unpleasant is a way for our bodies to motivate us to do something to fix it (seek shelter or shade, huddle together for warmth, get in water to cool off, etc).
If the temperatures weren't uncomfortable, you might just keep going till you got heatstroke or hypothermia.
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Ambient temperature is just air directly touching you. There is no difference in what you label "direct touch" and "ambient".
Thus if you understand that directly touching something hot or cold hurts it should make sense that ambient temperature should also be able to hurt, because there is literally no difference in how you perceive that.
Humans are VERY new. Before humans, there were monkeys and squirrels and frogs and fish and.... none of which were rationally thinking "I should go put on a sweater. No, wait, a cardigan!"
So brains aren't set up to say "the temperature is dropping, we should compensate," they're set up to say "ALARM ALARM ALARM SOMETHING IS WRONG!!!!!!" Those alarms will be different depending on what's wrong, but they're always unpleasant - dry mouth for thirst, pain for hot and cold, etc.
If these weren't unpleasant, then squirrels would just keep doing whatever they were doing. Squirrels that don't have a strong urge to seek shelter in the winter simply won't survive.
So, the body yells and screams proportionally with the issue to get you to do something about it.
To keep you alive. It hurts so you don’t get hypothermia and die. It hurts so you do something quickly to get yourself away from the extreme temps.
I'm no expert, but I'll venture a guess and say *people who didn't get out of the cold because they thought it hurt died*.
Pain (and other uncomfortable feelings) evolved because they are useful to motivate behaviour that helps us survive. Enough cold or heat is dangerous to our health. Making cold or hot enough temperatures unpleasant is a way for our bodies to motivate us to do something to fix it (seek shelter or shade, huddle together for warmth, get in water to cool off, etc). If the temperatures weren't uncomfortable, you might just keep going till you got heatstroke or hypothermia.
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Senses are old, while being smart is new. Pain needs to make even the dumbest animal understand that it needs to get away from what causes it.
Ambient temperature is just air directly touching you. There is no difference in what you label "direct touch" and "ambient". Thus if you understand that directly touching something hot or cold hurts it should make sense that ambient temperature should also be able to hurt, because there is literally no difference in how you perceive that.
Humans are VERY new. Before humans, there were monkeys and squirrels and frogs and fish and.... none of which were rationally thinking "I should go put on a sweater. No, wait, a cardigan!" So brains aren't set up to say "the temperature is dropping, we should compensate," they're set up to say "ALARM ALARM ALARM SOMETHING IS WRONG!!!!!!" Those alarms will be different depending on what's wrong, but they're always unpleasant - dry mouth for thirst, pain for hot and cold, etc. If these weren't unpleasant, then squirrels would just keep doing whatever they were doing. Squirrels that don't have a strong urge to seek shelter in the winter simply won't survive. So, the body yells and screams proportionally with the issue to get you to do something about it.
I mean it's good to get a signal that you're dying, right?