Jaynes quoted a colleague: “Philosophers are free to do whatever they please, because they don’t have to do anything right.”

Philosophers lack the feedback loop from reality that an engineer trying to build a mind has. Most of the heated philosophical squawking about minds will be rendered irrelevant once we start building them.

One of the reasons Dennett usually makes sense is he tries to know the science involved.

Just the other day I was watching Dennett: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hBQCBpyu74&feature=g-hist

At around 6:00, he's saying how he sees the job of philosophers as matching up the manifest image of the world with the scientific image of the world. I think that kind of philosophy will always be needed.