Some good reminders in this article. However, while I, too, reject Cartesian dualism, some of the claims of the author need correction...

"Many felt confounded or degraded by the idea of sharing a family tree with donkeys. [...] Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls. [...] The current debate on consciousness is influenced by our entrenched traditional ideas of ourselves"

Whose fear? Don't generalize, Carlo. These may be fears rooted in the modernist and Cartesian legacy, but they are only "traditional" if you think the world came into being during the 17th-18th century. Look back further and you find an Aristotelian and Thomistic view that also rejects metaphysical dualism. The soul here is the form of the body, which is to say, its formal cause. It isn't some ghost haunting a corpse or a puddle of ectoplasm. It is a principle. In this view, everything that is alive has a soul, which, again, is the name we give to the form of a living thing. Soul is just a class of form, and everything that exists has form.

What makes human beings different from other animals is, at the very least, that we possess intellects (and so, ontologically speaking, any embodied being with an intellect is human). The human intellect, according to this view, cannot be purely material, even if it relies on matter and even though it is united with bodily operations. The reason for this is that abstraction cannot occur in matter alone, as abstraction involves a mental operation of conceptual separation of the form of a thing as given in the senses. Matter (specifically what's called prime matter) is merely the principle of instantiation, and so it cannot "host" forms without instantiating that form. In other words, form + matter = thing.

"During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul."

No that is not how people viewed the body and the soul in the Middle Ages (or in, say, Catholicism). That is a very Cartesian view of human beings, that we are two things, not one.

"The body was an interconnected bunch of matter that decayed and died. The soul belonged to a transcendent spiritual world independent from vile matter."

Matter wasn't vile, unless you were some kind of Gnostic or Cathar heretic or whatever. The physical was seen as good, as created by God, and human beings were understood as spiritual-corporeal unities that are by one nature both spiritual and physical. (The "spiritual" here has to do with the intellectual and free nature of man; again, not ectoplasm or ghosts). Indeed, if anything, Christianity elevated the dignity of the physical. Why bother with a resurrection after death if matter sucks? Why would the body and blood of Christ be so precious to Catholics if matter is evil? It is Gnostic dualism and similar movements that construed the physical as evil, but these were heretical movements, not views characteristic of the Middle Ages.

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All that being said, I think the author would benefit greatly from a rigorous study of Aristotelian metaphysics, both to avoid these sorts of caricatures (as well as any misconceptions of science), but also to deepen his understanding. I think his rejection of dualism is on the right track, but he is missing out on a rich and robust intellectual tradition that has been sidelined by exactly those sorts of modernists that perpetuated this whole intellectual muddle in the first place.