Investigating Intersubjective Realities From a Novel NLP and Chaos Theory Approach

When does information become important, and how do sentiments gain traction and turn into beliefs, collective and revisionist histories, principles, and ideologies? As wars of human rights and contrasting beliefs and values rage across the Earth, such questions are incredibly important. While the current scope of my research is incapable of ending these global conflicts, I hope to start at a smaller scale, analyzing social media posts, documents, speeches, and transcripts around highly contentious events like the climate change crisis and immigration, for example, taking language as the currency of information to look for tipping points. Specifically, I’ll use Natural Language Processing and techniques of Chaos Theory to identify what, as historian and scholar Yuval Noah Harari defines as “intersubjective realities," or a “shared, mutual understanding between individuals.” Ultimately, these realities are the hotbed of shared beliefs, stories, and, at an enlarged scale, ideology, and thus important. Furthermore, this research will also act as a form of counterterrorism, looking for patterns in language and within these intersubjective realities to predict or evaluate the potential for a situation to spiral out of control. The first step lies in accumulating a wealth of open-source data, from which I can analyze several situations in multiple languages, as it is important to highlight the diversity and influence of language in conflicts and conversations. At the heart of my research lies a question, Harari asks, “If Sapiens are so wise, why are we so self-destructive?”. I hope to offer small-scale solutions, methodologies, and ways of looking at this fundamental paradox.