To me it seems to be mostly a matter of how we use language -- specifically, how we make distinctions in conditions of ignorance. There is a remnant of dualism in discussions of "consciousness" because we don't know all the details of how our brains produce it. There used to be a similarly dualistic distinction between "life" as some kind of non-physical phenomenon and the biochemistry that produces life. But since the discovery of RNA, DNA, and our increasing knowledge of how cells and even viruses actually work, I think few philosophers would still insist on a dualistic view of "life", or, for that matter, a sharp distinction between living and non-living systems.