Modern science has the same problem with energy, as it does with consciousness/sentience. That it can only be defined in terms of the forms it expresses.

Though, as I keep pointing out, both consciousness and energy go past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.

It is just that our digestive systems process the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system, with the brain doing the sorting and computing, senses and organizes the patterns generated.

So we are to the stage of believing that everything is information. Quantized and digitized, with no sense there is anything otherwise manifesting it.

That if we build computers complex enough, they will become sentient.

Now that is witchcraft.