You are almost completely what other people have told you, directly or indirectly. You wouldn't even be able to say “empirical observations” without someone tea

You are almost completely what other people have told you, directly or indirectly. You wouldn't even be able to say “empirical observations” without someone teaching you the language, for starters. The tendency to imagine “individual” as a spherical Omnipotent Observer in a vacuum comes from the manner textbook explanations of imaginary model interactions are automatically spread onto the whole world, and from unquestionable individualism affecting most of the reasoning of current era, and so on. It is simply ignorant to present the stitched corpses of vulgar materialism and its company as something “modern” (with a facelift to switch from “mechanistic” to “robotistic” model because engines stopped being cool for the public, computers are cool today). Ignorance can be ridiculed. Dostoevsky smirked at people making lecterns for Vogt, Moleschott, and Buchner, Goethe had fun with dialogues in Faust's study, but hey! We can safely skip all of that if we decide to call it “outdated”!