Hi, there!
I think Robin's ideas are ONE WAY of looking at the KOAN problem proposed by Andre. But is it the ONLY way? Granted, a relevant information is one that interacts with the mental context. But ...
What happens in the case of newborn babies? Do they have a pre-wired context to be used in acquiring information? According to mentalist ideas, which I share, they sure have. But, even then, this context is not something individually built by experience. On the contrary, it is the (purported) prewired universal mechanism that helps to build up a personality in one way or another.
It seems that this way of processing incoming information making no use of our INDIVIDUAL context may be trained. All mystical schools, from our Christian Tradition through the Muslim and over to the Buddhist one, have ways, physical or otherwise, in which the INDIVIDUAL mental context is eventually washed away in order to let incoming information flow in its pure (?!) form, or so they say. They call this experience "illumination" and it seems it gives you a sort of elation that is deeply desirable.
Setton is right in one way, then. If this feeling is so desirable, the effort to erase this sort of context as much as possible may help some people (not me! I never had an illumnation myself!) to struggle to get rid of it. But does this amount to the SAME process Sperber & Wilson propose in everyday communication? It might ... or not. As the Spanish medieval poet, Jorge Manrique, said:
(...) en este mundo traidor (in our treacherous world)
nada es verdad ni es mentira (nothing is true nor false)
todo depende del color (it all depends on the colour)
del cristal con que se mira (of the glass through which we look)
Hast'adiss! (which, in American English might be translated as abyssinia!)
Josi Luis Guijarro
http://www.infonegocio.com/joseluisguijarro
Facultad de Filosofma y Letras
Universidad de Cadiz
11002 Cadiz, Espaqa (Spain)
tlf: (34) 956-011.613
fax: (34) 956-015.505
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