In 1882, the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) had a go at inhaling nitrous oxide and, to his surprise, came away from the experience convinced that Hegel might not have been talking absolute nonsense after all. That was a bit awkward, because James had just written “On Some Hegelisms,” an essay which rips into many aspects of Hegelian philosophy.1 It’s fair to say James wasn’t enamoured with Hegel’s growing influence in American philosophy.
To cut a very long story short, Hegel thought that ideas which might, on the face of it, look like they’re opposed to each other (e.g., individual vs. community or freedom vs. necessity) don’t always have to stay stuck as oppositions. That’s because a contradiction can be worked through towards a more rational, richer whole that incorporates both sides. The tension itself is what drives thought forward. His German word for this was “Aufhebung,” which is usually translated as “sublation.” Perhaps a little oddly, it has a triple-edged meaning of cancelling, preserving, and lifting up at the same time. In essence, you overcome a limited position while retaining something of its truth, but that truth might look different once you understand its place within a bigger, all-encompassing whole.2
James’ beef with this was that it could start to explain away genuine conflict. Things that seem properly opposed, like good and evil, or competing loyalties, eventually just get swept up into some all-absorbing unity. And James was suspicious of this neatness. He was more comfortable leaving some tensions unresolved, with his own philosophy moving in pretty much the opposite direction to Hegel, towards pluralism. This is basically the view that the world is made of many parts that are related in various ways without having to add up to one completed, all-inclusive reality.3 James saw reality as open-ended and always in the making, with real novelty and loss always on the table.
Years earlier, James had read a strange little pamphlet by the eccentric philosopher Benjamin Blood called The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy (1874).4 Blood had spent years experimenting with anaesthetics, and had become convinced that his experiences had shown him some special truths about the nature of reality that ordinary discursive thought couldn’t get at. He called this the “anaesthetic revelation” and treated it as philosophically decisive: a direct glimpse of the underlying unity or “gist” of things. So our boy William wanted a piece of that action and got himself some nitrous oxide (which most people know as laughing gas).
It’s fair to say the gas blew James’ mind a bit. Suddenly Hegelianism wasn’t an annoyingly complicated theory he had to work to understand intellectually, because now he could feel what it was getting at. When he was high, James described the experience as a “metaphysical illumination,” where he could see the relationships between things that were normally hidden and boundaries melted away. Any thoughts he had also seemed to get swept up in that same underlying flow too. Reality felt like one big, connected whole.
In the below video, you can get a feel for what James experienced in how this lady describes her nitrous oxide experience. She goes into the dentist a cynical atheist and comes out feeling that everything was cooperating: “There was no solid, tangible thing there,” but “something much bigger in the universe.”
As any good scientist would do, James tried to write down some of what he was experiencing while he was still under the influence of the gas. Which sounds like a good idea if you think you’ve just grasped the secret structure of the universe, but when reflecting on it years later, James admitted that the words he brought back to sobriety from these states were usually “the veriest nonsense.” As an example, see if you can get your head around this selection:
What’s mistake but a kind of take?
What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea?
Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment.
Everything can become the subject of criticism—how criticise without something to criticise?
Agreement—disagreement!!
Emotion—motion!!!
[…]
By God, how that hurts! By God, how it doesn’t hurt! Reconciliation of two extremes.
By George, nothing but othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense!
Thought deeper than speech…!
Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL! Oh my God, oh God; oh God!5
In another sentence which he considered the most coherent and articulate, he pretty much went full Heidegger before Heidegger:
“There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.”
Now as you can imagine, that might sound pretty deep to a bloke sky high on laughing gas. And to be fair to him, James knew full well how it would look to a sober reader. But he still couldn’t bring himself to dismiss this “perfect delirium of theoretic rapture” because it had felt so real while it was happening. He’d seen something in Hegel’s philosophy that just reading Hegel hadn’t allowed him to see; suddenly it seemed obviously true, and the convictions of his intellect had been wrong. James quickly added a note to his finished essay explaining this, including the revelation’s horrifying other side.6
At first, the sense of unity James experienced when high on the gas felt expansive. But he soon found that the same logic of everything merging and belonging together turned unsettling very quickly. If all differences can be absorbed into a larger whole, then why the hell should anything matter more than anything else? Who cares about good and evil if they’re both just parts of the same process? Sense and nonsense? Same thing. Doing something or doing nothing? None of it makes much difference, so why even get out of bed on a morning?
This was where that cosy, all-embracing unity James had enjoyed at first started to feel a bit less like enlightenment and more like a trap. He described it as leading to a sort of “pessimistic fatalism,” where individual effort just seems ridiculous in the context of a vast whole and everything being “One.” In fact, James described the reversal from rapture into horror as one of the strongest and most frightening emotions he’d ever experienced.
There’s a bit of a wrinkle I should mention here in that a Hegelian would probably say that what James experienced wasn’t a successful “Aufhebung” at all. The nitrous experience seemed to produce unity by making differences evaporate. But Hegel’s stronger claim is that a higher unity should, rather than wiping them out, still preserve the differences it overcomes in a larger whole.7 I don’t want to take this essay down a Hegelian rabbit hole, but it’s an important point, as you’ll see shortly. There’s a big difference between a rich unity that can hold opposites together and a flat unity that can’t tell them apart anymore.
James Didn’t Write It Off
Fast-forward twenty years and James was still thinking about these experiences when he wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). He came back to nitrous oxide in particular while discussing mystical states of mind, saying it stimulates the mystical consciousness “in an extraordinary degree” and a “depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed” to the inhaler.8 But when the gas wore off, whatever the truth had been disappeared with it. James said that the feeling of having uncovered and understood a profound sense of meaning tended to stay behind, but the understanding itself usually didn’t.9
I’ve always quite liked James for the way he handled that. He didn’t immediately believe every revelation he had while in an altered state. But he didn’t just write it off because there was a physiological explanation for it either. In fact, that was one of his big objections to what he called “medical materialism.”10 That’s basically where people say things like: “Ah yes, but Saint Paul had epilepsy, didn’t he,” or “That religious experience you had was just a chemical reaction in your brain.” And then act as if that settles the matter.
James was more inclined to think that knowing the mechanism behind an experience doesn’t, by itself, tell you whether it disclosed anything valuable. So his empirical test wasn’t a case of “Where did this come from?” (e.g., brain chemistry, pathology, divine action, repressed desire, etc.) and more like “What did it do in the person’s life afterwards?” He thought we should judge by observable consequences in character and conduct. Did it make somebody kinder, braver, more alive, and more able to meet the world? Or did it leave them passive, frightened, grandiose, and detached from life? That seems a much better question to me, too. For James, explaining the origin of an experience and judging its value were two different jobs, which is where you can already see his pragmatic philosophy creeping in. Riffing on a biblical line, he said:
“By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.”
James didn’t think altered states settled the metaphysical argument or that every revelation should be believed. Nor did he think ordinary consciousness could dismiss other forms of experience just because they were unfamiliar. As he wrote, they:
“forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.”
My Wrong Turn With Ray Peat
When I first came across the James story, I made a mental note that I’d found another nice little connection to Ray Peat. That’s because, despite it being popular in fitness and sports-supplement circles, Peat spent years arguing that nitric oxide interferes with oxidative metabolism and plays a key role in stress and aging.11 In particular, he said it can inhibit cytochrome-c oxidase, a vital enzyme involved in the mitochondrial process of using oxygen to make useable energy.12
Ah ha! I thought to myself. That explains what James experienced. He took nitrous oxide, which inhibited his cellular respiration, which meant his brain lost energy, which caused him to start losing distinctions, and he mistaken that blurring for metaphysical oneness. Elementary, my dear Watson. The only problem was that muggins here had the wrong oxide. James took nitrous oxide, which is N₂O, but Peat was mostly talking about nitric oxide, which is NO. In other words, they’re completely different molecules.
Nitrous oxide definitely does something real to the brain and body, just not in the clean way I’d hoped for of “Hegel = inhibited respiration.”13 The chemistry and philosophy just don’t line up that cleanly, so I can’t say James had simply inhibited his mitochondrial respiration and then mistook the aftermath for God. The more interesting thing is a bit less neat, but it means that Peat does still belong in this essay.
When the Brain Gets Flatter
In 2023, a group of researchers at the University of Michigan looked at the brain scans of healthy volunteers who’d been given 35% nitrous oxide.14 It was a pretty small study, so I’m not going to try and build some grand philosophy of consciousness on the back of it here. Having said that, the results were pretty interesting.
The researchers were looking at what they call “functional differentiation.” In plain English, it’s roughly about how distinctly different parts and networks of the cortex sit within the brain’s overall functional organisation. Under nitrous oxide, some of those functional distinctions became less pronounced. And it turns out, the more intense the altered state the participants reported, the lower the functional differentiation tended to be. Brain-wide co-activation also became more frequent.
Remember that James said when he was under nitrous oxide, oppositions seemed to lose their force. Well, here we are, more than a century later, with people put in brain scanners on the same gas, and some functional distinctions in their brains became less pronounced. Those aren’t the same thing, and the study doesn’t establish how they’re related.15 But the correspondence is hard not to notice.
It also made me think about Peat again but in a totally different way than how I started out. The scans show something about how things are functionally organised, not about mitochondrial energy, so they don’t establish an energy-based explanation of James’s experience. But Peat also had a broader idea that’s useful here. He thought energetic capacity was part of what lets the brain sustain complexity instead of reducing experience to simpler categories. He once put it bluntly when discussing the brain:
“To the extent that it lacks energy, it reduces and simplifies.”
Peat’s suggestion was that adequate energy helps the brain maintain an unfolding understanding of a situation. Things remain processes with a past and possible futures, but when that capacity is compromised, he thought, experience becomes more rigidly categorical and loses some of its context. He was also once asked if a person would have better intuition if they had a higher rate of metabolism, to which he responded:
Yeah, probably. A hypothyroid, tired person has a very limited repertoire of thought processes. When your energy is high, you will cycle through different states, deep sleep, deep relaxation, and high intensity conscious activity. And those cyclings will take you through a variety of attitudes and experiences, and going from one to the next gives you a broader perspective. Out of that breadth, you can put together things that would never occur to someone who is staying on a level energy level.
Interviewer: Wouldn’t intuition be just a way of measuring open-mindedness, which is a surrogate itself for metabolism?
Peat: Yeah, open-mindedness in the sense of a certain amount of going out of your self-curiosity, looking for things to perceive, a sort of desire to perceive, leads to novel perceptions and novel intuitions.16
I don’t think we can use any of this as evidence to say that nitrous oxide lowered James’s brain energy and therefore caused his experience. But Peat’s broader point gives us a useful question. What does a living system need in order to keep many distinctions, possibilities, and perspectives available at once?
Being alive means burning energy to keep a bunch of things running at the same time. In your brain, part of that setup means staying flexible and reacting to what’s happening inside and outside you, instead of just giving the same standard response to everything. Peat’s idea is that when we’re running on empty, things get cut down to the bare basics and the details fade. Essentially, the world gets squeezed into a smaller set of categories.17
Two Kinds of Unity
Imagine two people who both have a powerful experience of unity like James described.
The first person sees connections they’d missed before. Things are still different to them, but more of their relationships become visible. What had seemed separate and isolated before now makes sense within a richer pattern. The second person feels that sense of unity because the differences themselves are sort of fading away and no longer seem to count for anything, making the world feel like one big thing.
There’s also a difference between being distinguishable and being separate. I can stop seeing myself as independent of the living world without becoming unable to tell a tree from a person. Some boundaries might even have been preventing me from seeing properly. Stop sorting people into “on my side” and “against me,” for example, and you might notice much more about them. One crude division has disappeared, but your understanding has become more detailed.
I think life itself is a good example of the first kind. For one, an organism isn’t alive because all of its cells do the exact same job. As I wrote about in a recent essay on Mae-Wan Ho, an organism’s cells can become wildly specialised while still belonging to one body.18 Ho saw this as local freedom with global coherence, whereby the differences aren’t a problem to be overcome but part of the achievement, much like a “quantum jazz band.”
Similarly, a brain in which every region behaved in exactly the same way would be beautifully uniform, but it would also be a sh*t brain! Which is why I’m increasingly conscious that the words I use when talking about a philosophy of Syntropology, like “coherence,” “integration,” and “wholeness,” can become a bit woolly if I’m not careful.
If coherence just means everything becoming alike, it’s not very impressive. Life is doing something much harder when it holds difference together without collapsing into fragmentation. As I see it, a syntropically developing system would be one capable of keeping more possibilities in play at once without fragmenting, with more ways of responding. It doesn’t have to try and squeeze every new thing into old categories.
In Pragmatism (1907), James gives us a useful way of approaching this. Instead of letting “everything is One” trump everything, he asks how things are connected and in what way:
“The world is one just so far as its parts hang together by any definite connexion. It is many just so far as any definite connexion fails to obtain.”19
Meaning Needs Difference
The more I thought about James writing in his note that, “whichever you choose it is all one,” the more it reminded me of the flattening that forms a core thread in my novel The Syntropist. In it, people get seduced by the “melt” into a featureless “soup” where no individuality is left and everyone is subsumed into everyone else. It also brings to mind Heidegger’s description of everyday conformity, where “everyone is the other, and no one is himself.”
That flattening also runs against another thread in the novel: the “Not-Yet,” which is a term I borrowed from Ernst Bloch. I use it to name what in life remains genuinely unfinished. The Not-Yet only matters to you if the future is open enough for your participation to matter. What you notice, choose, make, do, and become should make a difference to what comes next. Which means there needs to be something genuinely unresolved. Or, in other words, meaning needs difference somewhere.
Within a philosophy of Syntropology, a choice matters because something is genuinely at stake between possibilities. The future can draw you forward because it hasn’t happened yet, and several directions that it might take are still open to you. Even in ordinary perception, something has to stand out from something else for us to distinguish it.20
At its worst, James’s experience of unity made him feel like nothing he did really mattered. Sure, being part of the same whole doesn’t mean helping and hurting are basically the same thing. The problem was that those differences just started to feel like they didn’t count for anything. I don’t know about you, but I’m way more into the kind of unity that actually leaves room for us to get involved.
James has already given us a good place to start: look at the fruits! Does the experience make more of the world available? Can you see choices and possibilities you couldn’t see before? Are you less trapped in old labels and categories? Do you feel more able to take part in life? If so, the odds are something worthwhile has happened. Although it still wouldn’t prove that whatever you believed during it was true.
If a big revelation just leaves you convinced that none of it really matters, I’m not that impressed by how “infinite” it felt. I’d be more interested in what it helped me notice afterwards, especially the next time I chatted to someone I disagreed with. The tougher part is finding unity while still letting everyone stay unique and keeping the very differences that make life and meaning possible.
I’ll leave the final word with James, who nailed it in Varieties when he said these altered states can:
“…determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map.”21
My philosophical novel, The Syntropist, is available worldwide on Amazon. All royalties go to Hospice at Home.
Hegel begins with pure being, stripped of particular characteristics, and argues that it is indistinguishable from pure nothing; becoming expresses their transition. The qualification “pure” matters. In his classic example, “Being” and “Nothing” don’t just knock each other out or split the difference because, Hegel said, it’s their movement into one another that gives us “Becoming.”
For James, pluralism means that reality is genuinely many rather than secretly one: its parts may connect, but no final unity need absorb, explain or settle every difference. See William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909), Lecture VIII. (PDF)
“Note” attached to William James, “On Some Hegelisms,” in Mind: A Quarterly Review (April, 1882), No. 26., 206-208.
James himself comes close to this objection. In the appended note he says the nitrous state united reason and silliness “not in a higher synthesis,” and describes the identification of contradictions as a “self-consuming process” that moves towards increasing abstraction.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1901–1902), Lectures XVI–XVII. (PDF)
James still thought the experiences might have some metaphysical significance; he just couldn’t explain clearly what that significance was.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1901–1902), Lecture I. (PDF)
Nitric oxide is often seen as a good thing, especially in terms of things like better blood flow, stronger “muscle pumps,” oxygen delivery, and improved exercise performance. Beetroot juice is touted as especially effective for that reason. However, it doesn’t contain nitric oxide itself but dietary nitrate, which they hope the body will use to make more nitric oxide.
Peat did write about nitrous oxide, but his comments on it are much less straightforward. At one point he speculated that its anaesthetic effects might involve changes in the physical organisation of cellular water. See: “Unsaturated fatty acids: nutritionally essential or toxic?” (Article by Ray Peat).
Modern accounts tend to focus more on its action on NMDA receptors. With repeated exposure, it can also interfere with vitamin B12 and methionine synthase. See: Savage, S., & Ma, D. (2014). The neurotoxicity of nitrous oxide: the facts and “putative” mechanisms. Brain sciences, 4(1), 73–90. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci4010073
Dai, R., et al. (2023). Psychedelic concentrations of nitrous oxide reduce functional differentiation in frontoparietal and somatomotor cortical networks. Communications biology, 6(1), 1284. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-05678-1
The study doesn’t establish that consciousness became less rich or that the brain had less energy. Its authors leave open how their measure relates to broader measures of complexity. I can’t read “lower resolution” straight off those scans.
Episode 78 of the Generative Energy podcast (Transcript)
Autism and Causality (Newsletter by Ray Peat)
Mae-Wan Ho, Psychedelic Worms, and Life as Quantum Jazz (Substack Post)
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), Lectures XVI–XVII, “Mysticism.” (PDF)
Ray Peat and the Orienting Reflex (Substack Post)