An important topic Steven, but I found your response to be very muddled.

Either monism is true or it isn't.

If we are just a physical body, in just a physical universe, then we are trapped in a completely mechanistic system. Everything that happens, including the noises (words) we make, is nothing but the consequence of the laws of physics operating on matter. "You" and "I" don't exist as discreet entities and have no control over anything.

Clearly though, you and I are largely in control of what we write and say. To suggest otherwise is to descend into utter madness.

So physical monism is immediately and obviously wrong.

Logically we must be more than physical entities.

With that out of the way we can then focus on just what is the nature of this non-physical part of our being. (And how could it have come to be there?)

Western culture is dualistic all-the-way-down.
It has always been based on the war between "spirit" & "flesh", male vs female.
http://beezone.com/current/three_great_myths.html
http://www.adidam.org/teaching/gnosticon/religion-scientism
http://www.dabase.org/doubt.htm
http://beezone.com/current/2armp1.html
http://beezone.com/current/sciencemysticismlove.html

Iain McGilChrist has written two very interesting books on this topic The Master & His Emissary plus The Matter With Things.
http://www.integralworld.net/reynolds16.html "Matter" as Conscious Light

The fundamental error of this article is that it mixes up two totally different questions:

1) The relations between body, mind, person and soul.
2) What has all that to do with me?

The first set of questions are the more "juicy" ones and have too been explored extensively by the sages, but in essence they are not the most important ones, in essence they can be viewed as an extension of material science, which one day perhaps could even address them.

The second question is the important one: what have WE to do with it all - the body, the brain, the mind, the person, the spirit, the soul, etc.?

These are all THINGS, things we HAVE, and anything we have cannot be us, the ones who have them!

The poem "Nirvana Shatakam" (http://shlokam.org/nirvanashatakam/) states for example:

"Neither am I the mind nor intelligence or ego,
Neither am I the organs of hearing, nor that of tasting, smelling or seeing,
Neither am I the sky, nor the earth, neither the fire nor the air"
"Neither do I have hatred, nor attachment, neither greed nor infatuation,
Neither do I have passion, nor feelings of envy and jealousy"
"Neither am I bound by death and its fear, nor by the rules of caste and its distinctions,
Neither do I have father and mother, nor do I have birth"...

All these things may be wonderful - the body, the brain, the mind (whether inside or outside the brain), feelings, thoughts, personality, intelligence, will power, the soul if there is one, which can migrate between bodies, etc., etc., yet if there is no awareness of them, if there is nobody to experience them, then they are of no use, then they amount to nothing!

There may be a ghost in the machine or there may not be, yet even if there is, YOU are not that ghost. YOU are neither dependent on the machine nor on its ghost (if any), YOU are the one aware of that ghost-machine, pure awareness and nothing else, unborn, unchanging and never ending.