1. The Nature of the Mind

To achieve a consensual body of knowledge concerning the nature and origins of the mind that is comparable to scientific knowledge about many aspects of the objective, physical world, mental processes must be approached with the same spirit of unbiased empiricism that has inspired the past four hundred years of scientific inquiry. This means that mental phenomena should be observed with all the diligence and precision that Galileo and Darwin applied to physical and biological phenomena. William James recognized this fact in the late nineteenth century, but psychologists abandoned introspection, ostensibly because it failed to yield rigorous, replicable results. James was well aware of the challenges facing the first-person, scientific exploration of the mind, but he concluded that these were common to all kinds of observation: “introspection is difficult and fallible; and . . . the difficulty is simply that of all observation of whatever kind. . . . The only safeguard is in the final consensus of our farther knowledge about the thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones, until at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached.”⁷⁷

Nineteenth-century scientific attempts to use introspection to investigate the mind were primitive, faltering, with only rudimentary means for refining attention skills in general. The leading US researcher in this field was Edward B. Titchener (1867–1927), who created the largest doctoral program in the field of experimental psychology in the United States at the time, after becoming a professor at Cornell University. Having devoted his life to the development of introspective techniques, he observed that the 30main difficulties of introspection are “maintaining constant attention” and “avoiding bias,” but a further difficulty is “to know what to look for.”⁷⁸ But as we have noted previously, with the rise of behavioral psychology toward the beginning of the twentieth century, the direct observation and exploration of the mind by means of introspection was abandoned with the rise of behavioral psychologists, who simply decided to view the mind as nothing more than physical dispositions for behavior. From this time onward, the scientific study of the mind has been dominated by the ideological and methodological constraints of materialism. As we have seen, this approach gained further momentum with the rise of neuroscience in the 1960s, at which point experts in this field simply decided that the mind should be viewed as a biological function of the brain.

As we noted in the opening discussion on the śamatha practices of mindfulness of breathing, taking the impure mind as the path, and awareness of awareness, such advanced training in mental balance and concentration provides just the skills needed to engage in rigorous investigations of the mind and its role in nature. When the achievement of śamatha is conjoined with a range of practices of vipaśyanā, such research has illuminated four aspects of the mind’s nature, based on replicable, empirical discoveries made by thousands of contemplatives throughout Asia. These are the phenomenological nature of consciousness, the essential nature of the mind, the ultimate nature of the mind, and the transcendent nature of consciousness that lies within the very ground of the whole of reality.

The Phenomenological Nature of Consciousness

While modern scientists and philosophers have proposed a wide range of definitions of consciousness, they have achieved no consensus, nor have they devised any scientific means of measuring consciousness. They have left us in the dark regarding the nature and origins of consciousness and its relationship to the body and the natural world at large. In the tradition of Buddhism originating in India and evolving further in Tibet for more than a millennium, contemplatives and scholars long ago identified two defining characteristics of consciousness: luminosity⁷⁹ and cognizance.⁸⁰ A definition of any entity is useful insofar as it enables one to identify that entity when it is observed and to distinguish it from all other entities. The Buddhist definition of consciousness satisfies these criteria, whereas the many notoriously diverse materialist definitions do not. The characteristic of luminosity (the Tibetan 31word for which may also be rendered as clarity) has a twofold meaning. The first is that consciousness is clear in the sense of being insubstantial, devoid of materiality. When observed directly, consciousness displays no physical qualities whatsoever—no mass, size, shape, velocity, or location—nor can it be measured or detected with any physical instrument. The second meaning is that consciousness illuminates, or makes manifest, all sensory and mental appearances. Were it not for consciousness, there would be no appearances of any kind. Consciousness enables us to experience visual shapes and colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations, as well as all mental processes, including thoughts, the arising of mental images, desires, emotions, dreams, and so on. The cognizance of consciousness refers to the experience of knowing and understanding the objects that appear to consciousness.

The obvious fact of the immateriality of consciousness has been fiercely resisted by materialists, who insist that the only things that exist are those that can be measured through physical means, namely, matter, energy, space, time, and their emergent properties. Over the past four hundred years, scientists have explored a vast array of physical entities, and without exception, their functions and emergent properties have also been found to have physical characteristics. But the materialists’ assertion that the mind and consciousness are functions or emergent properties of the brain is an exceptional claim that is unsupported by compelling evidence. It is well known that mental and neural processes are correlated; however, as noted previously, the actual nature of those correlations remains as much as mystery as it was during Huxley’s time. Indeed, he found ludicrous the very idea that states of consciousness could actually emerge from the activity of neurons: “How it is that any thing so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.”⁸¹

Materialists would have us believe that there are only two options when considering the relation between the body and mind: either one adopts the mind-body dualism of Descartes, which is seen as having been discredited by contemporary science, or one accepts the view of materialistic monism, which is the metaphysical foundation for science promoted by Huxley. Both of these alternatives have proven sterile and unilluminating in terms of fathoming the nature and origins of the mind, so it is high time to escape the confines of this ideological straitjacket. Beyond the dichotomy of monism and dualism is the open expanse of a pluralistic universe, consisting of a 32wide range of phenomena that fall outside the categories of either mind or matter.⁸² These include such nonphysical phenomena as meaningful information, appearances to consciousness, the mathematical laws of nature, and mathematical truths in general—along with justice, beauty, and human beings, who possess bodies and minds but are equivalent to neither.

Among the diverse phenomena that do not consist of states of matter or of mind, information is of particular interest, especially as modern civilization evolves beyond the industrial age to the information age. With the widespread use of personal computers and the Internet, we commonly refer to the amount of information stored in such systems; and since the brain is viewed as a biological computer, there is much talk of information being stored in brain circuits and processed by neurons and synapses. Many scientists and journalists go so far as to claim that individual neurons themselves “consciously” process and relay information to other parts of the brain, without being able to explain how the individual “consciousnesses” of a hundred billion neurons in the brain coalesce into the unitary stream of consciousness each of us experiences firsthand.

The philosopher John Searle challenges this naïve belief: “The information in the computer is in the eye of the beholder, it is not intrinsic to the computational system . . . The electrical state transitions of a computer are symbol manipulations only relative to the attachment of a symbolic interpretation by some designer, programmer or user.”⁸³ In other words, meaningful, semantic information is not objectively present inside a computer in the same way that silicon chips are present. The information we say is stored in a computer exists only in relation to the conscious agents who create, program, and use computers. George F. R. Ellis further clarifies that bits of information “exist as nonmaterial effective entities, created and maintained through social interaction and teaching . . . Thus while they may be represented and understood in individual brains, their existence is not contained in any individual brain and they certainly are not equivalent to brain states. Rather the latter serve as just one of many possible forms of embodiment of these features.”⁸⁴

Consciousness—as the simple experience of being aware—is not an attribute of individual neurons or silicon chips, and there is no compelling evidence that such consciousness is an emergent property of the brain conceived as some kind of biological computer. The word “consciousness” has been used so often now in a loose and undefined figurative sense, in an almost 33playful effort to personify observed physical processes, that the scientific community sometimes seems to forget what it is we all experience as the fact of being conscious every day, which involves being aware. If we keep in mind such first-person experience, then it becomes readily evident that individual neurons just don’t have the experience of being aware. Yet a belief in some imagined existence of a “consciousness” that could be an emergent property of matter has in many cases become an unquestioned assumption that precedes virtually all relevant scientific research while ignoring scientific evidence to the contrary.

The root of much modern confusion about the nature of information arises from the conflation of quantitative and qualitative information. Quantitative information, as defined by physicists, is the pattern of organization of matter and energy, which is inversely related to entropy. Qualitative, or semantic, information is meaningful in that it has a referent that is known by a conscious being.⁸⁵ Quantitative information is objectively measurable, whereas semantic information exists only relative to a conscious agent who is informed. The chemicals and electricity inside computers and brains have no referents. In and of themselves, they aren’t about anything, and they don’t refer to anything, any more than the letters “S T O P” refer to anything apart from their being understood by conscious agents who have agreed among themselves what this sequence of letters means. This point was clearly recognized seventy years ago by the MIT mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener (1894–1964): “The mechanical brain does not secrete thought ‘as the liver does bile,’ as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.”⁸⁶ Unfortunately, materialism has indeed survived to the present day, in part due to materialists’ successful campaign to supplant this inconvenient truth with spurious conjectures.

Materialists tend to feel most at home in the mechanistic materialism that characterized physics during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. But cognitive scientists in particular have largely overlooked, misunderstood, or marginalized the revolutionary implications of quantum physics that emerged in the early twentieth century. As the physicists Časlav Brukner and Anton Zeilinger explain: “In classical physics a property of a system is a primary concept prior to and independent of observation and information is a secondary concept which measures our ignorance about properties of the 34system. In contrast in quantum physics the notion of the total information of the system emerges as a primary concept, independent of the particular complete set of complementary experimental procedures the observer might choose, and a property becomes a secondary concept, a specific representation of the information of the system that is created spontaneously in the measurement itself.”⁸⁷

Rather than viewing quantum systems as local, anomalous conditions created and protected from outside influences in physics laboratories, the eminent theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008), in collaboration with Bryce DeWitt, applied the principles of quantum physics to the universe as a whole, resulting in the field known as “quantum cosmology.” One startling finding was that for the universe at large, time itself disappeared from the equations: the universe is frozen. Only when they introduced an “observer-participant,” with a perceptual reference point in space-time, did time and a changing universe manifest. The evolution of the universe can occur only when a subjective consciousness declares his or her “now,” thereby establishing both past and future relative to that present moment. But past and future exist only relative to this observer-participant; they are not absolutely existent.⁸⁸ This interpretation casts a fresh light on the so-called measurement problem in quantum physics, which has remained unsolved since it was first identified almost a century ago. According to Wheeler, for a measurement to take place, a true observation of the physical world must impart meaningful information, signifying a transition from the realm of mindless stuff to the realm of conscious knowledge. Rather than thinking of the universe as matter in motion, he proposed that one could regard it as information being processed, and this requires the participation of conscious observers who are aware of such information.

A major reason why scientists so widely believe that consciousness must emerge from matter stems from the current scientific understanding of the evolution of the cosmos as a whole. According to modern cosmology, the universe began with the emergence of matter and energy following the Big Bang, roughly 13.7 billion years ago; our planet formed about 5 billion years ago, and organic life first emerged roughly 3.5 billion years ago. Over the course of biological evolution on Earth, there is no physical record indicating the first emergence of conscious organisms, for the simple reason that consciousness is physically undetectable. But it is assumed that the first conscious organisms evolved from more primitive, less complex, unconscious 35organisms, so the emergence and development of higher and higher levels of consciousness in living organisms must be correlated with increasing degrees of complexity in their brains.

The logic of this argument appears to be irrefutable until one notes a simple fact that is almost universally overlooked by cosmologists and biologists: This entire narrative of the history of the universe and of life on Earth is based solely upon physical measurements. If you ask only physical questions and perform only physical measurements, the universe you conceive on this basis will contain only physical entities. If there were in fact nonphysical influences on the origin and evolution of the universe and living organisms, physicists and biologists would fail to discover them, as long as they limit themselves to the current methods of scientific inquiry. In short, the modern scientific view of the universe and humanity’s place in it is materialistic for a simple reason: all observations that inform it are restricted to physical phenomena. The mind, consciousness, and all other nonphysical phenomena throughout the universe have been excluded from this reductionist worldview. Since the only world we know to exist is one in which the minds of conscious beings play the all-important role of illuminating and knowing the reality we inhabit, any projected universe that would consist solely of physical phenomena is a fantasy in the imaginations of those who have conceived it.

But if the universe that we experience exists only in relation to our experience of it, how could this be compatible with the known scientific facts concerning the evolution of the universe and life on Earth? John Wheeler offers a revolutionary solution to this conundrum. According to him, the universe consists of a “strange loop,” in which physics gives rise to observers and observers give rise to at least part of physics. The conventional view of the relationship between observers and the objective world is that matter yields information, and information makes it possible for observers to be aware of matter by way of measurements. This can be depicted as a sequence: matter → information → observers. Wheeler, on the contrary, proposes that the presence of observers makes it possible for information to arise, for there is no information without someone who is informed. Matter is a category constructed out of information. Thus Wheeler inverts the sequence: observers → information → matter.⁸⁹

This implies that the current scientific narrative of the history of the universe is not absolutely real and objective, existing prior to and independent of all measurements. Wheeler explains, “It is wrong to think of that past as ‘already existing’ in all detail. The ‘past’ is theory. The past has no existence 36except as it is recorded in the present. By deciding what questions our quantum registering equipment shall put in the present we have an undeniable choice in what we have the right to say about the past.”⁹⁰ This implies that at the macrocosmic level, the universe is fundamentally an information-processing system, from which the appearance of matter emerges at a higher level of reality. At the microcosmic level, each sentient being is a conscious, information-processing system. In both cases, it is semantic information, and not objective, quantitative information, that is crucial. Thus, in quantum physics, the “materiocentric” view of the universe has been supplanted by an “empiricocentric” view; and this reframing is at least as far-reaching in its consequences as the reframing from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of humanity’s place in the cosmos.

Brukner and Zeilinger caution that this hypothesis “does not imply that reality is no more than a pure subjective human construct.”⁹¹ On the basis of observations, scientists are able to conceive of objects with sets of properties that do not change across diverse modes of observation and description. They are “invariants” with respect to those observations. Predictions based on any such specific invariants may then be verified by any sufficiently trained observer, and as a result intersubjective agreement about the theories in question may be achieved; and this gives the impression that these invariant, mentally constructed objects exist at a level more fundamental than scientists’ measurements and conceptual formulations.

Scientists or not, whenever we conceive of an entity, we think in terms of the entity as a “whole,” which bears multiple parts and attributes. But which of these, if any, are objectively real and independent of our conceptual designation of them? William James suggests that “‘Wholes’ are not realities there, parts only are realities.” Wholes are “not realized by any organ or any star, or experienced apart from the consciousness of an onlooker.”⁹² But as soon as we identify a part of any whole, that part itself is identified as having its own parts or attributes, in which case it, too, becomes a whole. Even the very notions of “part” and “whole” have no meaning independent of each other. To speak of a part that is unrelated to a whole is as meaningless as speaking of a whole with no parts. Yet if one exists only relative to the other, they must both exist only relative to the mind that conceives of them. James undermines his own assertion of the independent reality of parts when he cites the Scottish philosopher Edward Caird (1835–1908), who comments, “Isolate a thing from all its relations, and try to assert it by itself; you find that 37it has negated itself as well as its relations. The thing in itself is nothing.”⁹³

This principle of interdependence also applies to the relationships within the triad of semantic information, the informed consciousness, and the referent of the information; and this is key to understanding the implications of quantum cosmology. Remove any one of these three elements and the other two vanish simultaneously. That is, in the absence of semantic information, there can be nothing about which one is informed and no one who is informed about it. Likewise, if there is no conscious agent who is informed, there can be no flow of information and hence no reference to anything about which one might be informed. Finally, if there is no referent of the information, the categories “information” and “the consciousness that is informed” are devoid of meaning. This implies that consciousness lies at the very foundation of the known universe, and it is mutually interdependent with the information it perceives and the phenomena of which it is informed. Each of these three elements is devoid of existence in and of itself, for all three arise in mutual interdependence.

Much insight is to be gained from the analogy of the macrocosm of the universe to the microcosm of a human being. On this theme the Buddha declared, “It is in this fathom-long body with its perceptions and its mind that I describe the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world, and the way leading to the cessation of the world.”⁹⁴ Rather than reducing human existence to an amalgam of matter and energy, it may be far more illuminating to regard ourselves primarily as conscious information-processing beings, who have conceived of the derivative constructs of matter and energy. We are not configurations of stardust, but rather the conscious creators of our known physical world, which we commonly conceive in the mentally constructed categories of matter, energy, and their emergent properties.

Waking up from the fantasy that only physically measurable phenomena exist, we may swiftly note that all the immediate contents of our sensory and mental experience are nonphysical. Appearances to our physical senses, such as colors and sounds, do not exist in the objective world, independently of our physical senses, nor do they exist inside our heads. All the information that we process about the world is devoid of any physical attributes, as noted previously. The physical world as it is imagined to exist independently of all nonphysical appearances and information can never be observed by anyone. This is not to say that the physical world doesn’t exist, only that the physical world—as we observe it and make sense of it—doesn’t exist independently of our observations and concepts.

This cutting-edge view of the interrelated nature of mind and matter, and more specifically the mind and body, finds a basis in even the earliest of Buddhist writings. For example, the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk and scholar Weragoda Sarada Maha Thero explains that the Pāli terms nāma and rūpa, sometimes translated as “mind” and “body,” are in fact not two separate, inherently real entities that somehow interact with each other. Rather, they are two ways of looking at a unified experience. He suggests that nāma (lit. “naming”) is experience seen subjectively as “the mental process of identifying an object.” Rūpa (“appearing form”) is experience seen objectively as “an entity that is perceived and conceived through the mental process of identification.” Manō, often translated as “mind” or “mentation,” refers to “the mental process of conceptualization, which integrates and makes meaning out of the different percepts brought in through the different senses.” This meaningful total experience is viewed subjectively as the “identification of an entity” (nāma) and objectively as “the entity identified” (rūpa).⁹⁵

The “mind-body problem” that has plagued Eurocentric civilization for centuries was created and has been perpetuated by a way of thinking that assumes that the mind and body exist as separate, inherently real entities that inexplicably interact with each other. Cartesian dualists have never been able to present a compelling explanation for how such interaction occurs, and materialist monists have pretended to solve the problem either by equating the mind with physical processes—without justification—or by dismissing the existence of the mind altogether. By challenging the metaphysical assumption that underlies this problem, Buddhists can show that the problem begins to unravel by itself.

The Essential Nature of the Mind

To understand what is meant in a Buddhist context by the “essential nature”⁹⁶ of the mind, we may contrast this with its “manifest nature.”⁹⁷ The practice of taking the impure mind as the path, also called settling the mind in its natural state, which was introduced earlier, is a sophisticated method for examining the manifest nature of thoughts, memories, desires, emotions, and all manner of mental appearances. From the vantage point of the stillness of awareness, one may observe with an increasingly rigorous “internal objectivity” the circumstances by which mental events arise, how they are present once they have arisen, and how they vanish. In the classic Buddhist practice of closely applying mindfulness to the mind,⁹⁸ one also examines whether mental phenomena 39are stable or in constant flux, are veritable sources of well-being or fundamentally unsatisfying, and whether they are by their own nature “I” and “mine” or simply events arising in dependence upon prior causes and conditions. Moreover, a central theme in such investigations is to determine which mental factors play crucial roles in afflicting the mind and triggering harmful behavior and which give rise to a genuine sense of well-being for oneself and others. Specifically, one examines the ways in which craving, hostility, and delusion disrupt the equilibrium of the mind and generate unease, anxiety, and unhappiness.

The manifest nature of mind that is scrutinized in such practice does arise in dependence upon brain activity and physical stimuli from the body and environment, as well as on the basis of prior states of consciousness and mental processes. So this mind is strongly configured, or conditioned, by many environmental, physiological, and psychological factors that are uniquely human. In the practice of settling the mind in its natural state, one allows this flow of consciousness that is shaped by all such factors to “melt” into a progressively primal flow that is called the “essential nature of the mind.” The relation between the manifest and essential nature of the mind may be likened to that between a specialized cell, such as a neuron, and a stem cell. Just as a stem cell is configured by biological factors to become any one of a wide variety of specialized cells, so this primal flow of consciousness, known as the substrate consciousness, is configured by mental and physical factors to become a wide range of human and nonhuman minds.

To review the method of settling the mind in its natural state: While resting in the stillness of awareness, withdraw the attention from all five domains of sensory experience, and focus single-pointedly on the domain of mental events, observing whatever thoughts arise, without following after those pertaining to the past, and without being drawn into thoughts about the future. Do not try to modify, block, or perpetuate any mental events that arise, but simply observe their nature, without letting your attention be drawn away to any referents of thoughts or images. Sustain the flow of mindfulness without being distracted by any objective appearances to your five physical senses, and without identifying with any subjective mental impulses or processes. Sustain the stillness of your awareness in the midst of the movements of the mind. As the Buddha Samantabhadra explains in the Vajra Essence, “Fluctuating thoughts do not cease; however, mindful awareness exposes them, so you don’t get lost in them as usual. By applying yourself to this practice 40continuously at all times, both during and between meditation sessions, eventually all coarse and subtle thoughts will be calmed in the empty expanse of the essential nature of your mind. You will become still, in an unfluctuating state in which you experience bliss like the warmth of a fire, luminosity like the dawn, and nonconceptuality like an ocean unmoved by waves.”⁹⁹

The culmination of this process of settling the mind in its natural, or unconfigured, state occurs, as Samantabhadra comments, when:

All sensory and mental appearances are illuminated, or made manifest, by this substrate consciousness, but it does not enter into, or cognitively fuse with, these appearances. They do not arise anywhere in physical space, but rather emerge from, are located in, and eventually dissolve back into the immaterial space of the substrate. The substrate is clearly ascertained when the mind has completely settled into its natural state, but you also enter into this state in deep, dreamless sleep, when you faint, and in the culminating phase of the dying process.

As noted above, the three salient characteristics of the substrate consciousness are bliss, luminosity, and nonconceptuality. When experienced from within the context of the ordinary mind, the three primary mental afflictions of craving, hostility, and delusion are seen to be highly toxic, disruptive influences on the mind. But when these same mental processes are viewed from the perspective of the substrate consciousness, one recognizes that their essential natures correspond respectively to bliss, luminosity, and nonconceptuality, from which each of those afflictions arises. As these primal qualities of the essential nature of the mind become conditioned and manifest in the ordinary human mind, they become afflictive, but their essential nature is not toxic in any way.

This raises the more general question of the causal origination of all states of consciousness and mental processes. In the mid-nineteenth century, the 41German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz mathematically formalized the principle of the conservation of energy, which implies that in the world of nature, nothing ever arises from nothing, nor does something that exists ever transform into nothing, disappearing without a trace. All configurations of matter-energy emerge from prior configurations of matter-energy, and the same is true of configurations of space-time. This principle of conservation, which is a central pillar of modern physics, pertains to all the fundamental constituents of nature, so it is reasonable to ask: Does it also hold for the emergence and disappearance of consciousness?

We may consider three basic alternatives. First, if consciousness is nonphysical, as indicated by all evidence, then the hypothesis that it emerges from a configuration of matter-energy would violate the physical principle of conservation of matter-energy, for this would entail something physical transforming into something not physical.

Second, if consciousness emerges from nothing, this would make it unlike anything else in the known world, while also defying common sense: How could nothing ever be influenced so that it transforms into something?

Third, if consciousness emerges from something nonphysical and it follows the same principle of conservation as matter-energy and space-time, then it must emerge from a prior configuration of consciousness, which is in fact the Buddhist view.

Of course, a fourth option is that consciousness is indeed physical, as so many materialists believe, at least those who don’t deny its existence altogether. Evidence against this hypothesis is that it displays no physical characteristics when experienced directly, and it can’t be measured with any physical instrument. States of consciousness in humans have been found to be correlated with brain states, and there is as much evidence that the brain influences the mind as there is that the mind influences the brain. But the mere fact that mental processes correspond to physical processes in the brain in no way logically implies that they are identical or that the mind is physical.

In the Buddhist analysis of causality, a clear distinction is drawn between a substantial cause¹⁰¹ and a cooperative condition.¹⁰² A substantial cause transforms into its effect and loses its own identity in the process, while a cooperative condition influences its effect without losing its identity in doing so. For example, a kernel of corn is a substantial cause of a stalk of corn, for the substance of the kernel transforms into the substance of the stalk, and in so doing, its identity as a kernel is lost as it becomes the stuff of the stalk. A 42farmer’s decision to plant a field of corn, the tractor he uses to plow the field, and the workers who sow the crop all serve as cooperative conditions for the emergence of stalks of corn, but they do not transform into the crop. These two types of causality are prevalent in the field of physics as well. According to classical physics, when one billiard ball strikes another, it acts as a cooperative condition for the second ball to move, but it doesn’t turn into that ball; and particles of matter influence fields and vice versa as cooperative conditions, but do not turn into them. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, space-time and mass-energy mutually influence each other as cooperative conditions without space-time turning into configurations of mass-energy or vice versa. Finally, in quantum physics, according to the Copenhagen Theory, the act of measurement causes a probability field to collapse, but