Artificial intelligence is not a new concept; it has been the subject of several science fiction novels, movies, and television shows. Terms such as “thinking machine” and “mechanical brain” are often used to describe the idea of artificial intelligence. But what, exactly, is artificial intelligence? Twenty years ago, such a question was largely philosophical and was usually satisfied with a classic definition: “the capacity of a machine to perform operations analogous to learning and decision making in humans.” Today, it is possible to give a more rigorous but, at the same time, operational characterization. In fact, in the last fifty years, there has evolved a procedure-based, flexible, and value-free definition avoiding the often-anthropocentric connotations that were once attached to “capable of playing a reasonable game of chess” or “demonstrating that it is able to learn by doing.” The best of these definitions is that of the founder of artificial intelligence research: “Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to stimulate it.” With this definition, any difference between an artificially generated artifact and an animate object is a difference of implementation; the artifact uses electronic or mechanical transducers and effectors controlled by electronic or mechanical systems that exploit nonlinear materials, whereas the animate object uses analog transducers and effectors controlled by analog systems that exploit nonlinear physics. The difference is only skin-deep. Since animate artifacts are constructed entirely from physical materials that follow fundamental physical laws, there is no reason why the materials and methods of the animate artifact could not be used to make an artificial intelligence and prove that it is a mind/body problem, only if they are used to make intelligent animals. The possibility of designing an artificial device with the same properties requires that every intelligent process, if it can be precisely described, can be simulated by such a device.