Is everything exclusively relational / defined by its context?

I had a conversaion about where taste comes from. We concluded from associations. I constructed an example where you had to choose between 2 things that were clearly distinct, but had NO existing associations. We could not come up with a preference.

But if positive preferences diffuse through the association-web in our mind, where is the source? Maybe a more fundamental algorithm like evloution and the drive to survive are the sources, diffusing through associations to other objects building our preferences

For example I like a nice shirt, because I associate it with wealth, associating it with resource abundance, which evolution programmed into me since I was a single cell is a good thing

Anyway, just speculations, I did 0 seconds of research.