No, not exactly--but the point is to stand on the shoulders of giants who are themselves standing on the shoulders of other giants, etc..

It's not obvious, a priori, what the nature of reality is, how to formulate knowledge, whether it is possible to develop ideas that are independent of the identity of the person thinking them and if so how to accumulate reliable ideas rapidly (or even what it means for an idea to be reliable), and so on.

There has been a lot of deep thought and effort put into these areas, mostly under the title of philosophy.

But we don't have to keep asking the same questions with ever more opaque language in order to gain insight. We can build on what we've already learned.

We have learned, quite convincingly, that it is hard to know whether realism, anti-realism, or something else is "the way things actually are" (if that even makes sense). However, we have learned that a pragmatic epistemology that acts as if we're realists works spectacularly well, provided that we can master humans' social and individual cognitive quirks that derail us (and oh boy do they derail us a lot).

We have learned, quite convincingly, that models of shared consciousness and pretty much anything that looks like idealism-with-functional-consequences is wrong: whenever we are in a situation where we would expect to be able to tell the difference, the answer is always, "nope, not like idealism".

This isn't obvious at first glance. Supernaturalism? Nope. Connected minds? Nope. Dreamtime as a co-equal reality? Nope. Abstraction of ideas to be idea-holder independent? Yep.

It is only after we've discovered all this that we understand whether or not it is safe to simply reason plainly--and sometimes the answer is no it is not, as is the case with entanglement, relativity, introspection as a guide to cognition, and so on.

But in the case of individuals being individuals, it is. What you see is what you get: looks like there are individuals (not assuming that there are individuals), and yep, there are. If you feel like doing statistics, you can formalize "individual" in terms of the correlations induced by them in observations: you hear this type of sound and see that kind of thing when those bits of matter in this particular relationship are over there, and compared to the full distribution of time evolution of matter-in-something-like-that-form, that one can be predicted to act like this unless those correlations in the structure of their brain are disrupted, etc. etc..

But the formalization isn't really necessary. None of the possible confounders that could have made the plain interpretation faulty turned out to be right--at least, none of the ones we thought of. That's not something we need to worry about at this point, not from our lofty perch on the shoulders of giants. We can keep checking--it's always good to keep checking--but this seems awfully solid at this point.

All our old ideas about who we are as humans turned out to be somewhat wrong. We're not as rational as some hoped--but we can build an immense store of knowledge anyway. We aren't imbued with a divine soul that determines our nature--it's a consequence of the arrangement of our brains, which in turn is a consequence of development and experience-dependent plasticity. But we are each us--affected by things, but we are self-implemented.

There is no reasonable sense in which time is an epiphenomenon of human perception--if it were, internal combustion engines wouldn't work. There is a very clear, completely observer-independent, directionality to time. We notice correlations and cleave reality at its joints to describe "entities"--the correlations are really there, with actual consequences, not just figments of our imagination.

"Becoming" is poetic. It's dreadfully imprecise, though. How plastic are which behaviors? To what extent, if any, do various experiences shape one's sense of self? To what extent do which kind of individual interactions contribute to a collective epiphenomenon of "society" that we as individuals can perceive in aggregate? Etc. etc..

I am not content to take things at face value, but I am also quite wary of taking things with poetic simplicity when my goal is not to be moved emotionally but actually understand.