Chomsky explaining his view on Mind/Body and by the way on his view of Cartesian dualism, etc. I think you misunderstand Chomsky here.
"The biolinguistic perspective views a person's language in all of its aspects – sound, meaning, structure -- as a state of some component of the mind, understanding "mind" in the sense of 18th century scientists who recognized that after Newton's demolition of the "mechanical philosophy," based on the intuitive concept of a material world, no coherent mind-body problem remains, and we can only regard aspects of the world "termed mental," as the result of "such an organical structure as that of the brain," as chemist-philosopher Joseph Priestley observed. Thought is a "little agitation of the brain," David Hume remarked; and as Darwin commented a century later, there is no reason why "thought, being a secretion of the brain," should be considered "more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter." By then, the more tempered view of the goals of science that Newton introduced had become scientific common sense: Newton's reluctant conclusion that we must be satisfied with the fact that universal gravity exists, even if we cannot explain it in terms of the self-evident "mechanical philosophy." As many commentators have observed, this intellectual move "set forth a new view of science" in which the goal is "not to seek ultimate explanations" but to find the best theoretical account we can of the phenomena of experience and experiment (I. Bernard Cohen).
"The central issues in the domain of study of mind still arise, in much the same form. They were raised prominently at the end of the "Decade of the Brain," which brought the last millennium to a close. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences published a volume to mark the occasion, summarizing the current state of the art. The guiding theme was formulated by neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle in his introduction to the volume: It is the thesis that "Things mental, indeed minds, are emergent properties of brains, [though] these emergences are not regarded as irreducible but are produced by principles...we do not yet understand." The same thesis, which closely paraphrases Priestley, has been put forth in recent years as an "astonishing hypothesis" of the new biology, a "radically new idea" in the philosophy of mind, "the bold assertion that mental phenomena are entirely natural and caused by the neurophysiological activities of the brain," and so on. But this is a misunderstanding. The thesis follows from the collapse of any coherent concept of "body" or "material" in the 17th century, as was soon recognized. Terminology aside, the fundamental thesis remains what has been called "Locke's suggestion": that God might have chosen to "superadd to matter a faculty of thinking" just as he "annexed effects to motion, which we can in no way conceive motion able to produce.""
Biolinguistics and the Human Capacity - Noam Chomsky - Delivered at MTA, Budapest, May 17, 2004
"[T]he notion of "physical world" is open and evolving. No one believes that bodies are Cartesian automata . . . or that physical systems are subject to the constraints of Cartesian mechanism, or that physics has come to an end. It may be that contemporary natural science already provides principles adequate for the understanding of mind. Or perhaps principles now unknown enter into the functioning of the human or animal minds, in which case the notion of "physical body" must be extended, as has often happened in the past, to incorporate entities and principles of hitherto unrecognized character. Then much of the so-called "mind–body problem" will be solved in something like the way in which the problem of the motion of the heavenly bodies was solved, by invoking principles that seemed incomprehensible or even abhorrent to the scientific imagination of an earlier generation." [ Chomsky 1980 ]
"Newton exorcised the machine, not the ghost: surprisingly, the principles of contact mechanics are false, and it is necessary to invoke what Newton called an "occult quality" to account for the simplest phenomena of nature, a fact that he and other scientists found disturbing and paradoxical . . .
"These moves also deprive us of any determinate notion of body or matter. The world is what it is, period. The domain of the "physical" is nothing other than what we come more or less to understand, and hope to assimilate to the core natural sciences in some way, perhaps by modifying them radically, as has often been necessary . . .
"With the collapse of the traditional theory of "matter" or "body," metaphysical dualism becomes unstateable; similarly, such notions as "physicalism" or "eliminative materialism" lose any clear sense – unless some new notion of "physical" is offered to replace the abandoned Cartesian concept . . ."