Now, your dogs may very well be smarter than mine. But here's how I imagine a convo with my dogs would go.

- Let's go see what's on the other side of this door, friend, maybe there's food !!

Ok, friend, here you go. - opens door.

- Wow super cool, now let's go see what's on the other side of this door, friend, maybe there's food !!

If one were to go about translating brain waves from dogs to meaning, we'd run into a big problem immediately: vocabulary resolution.

What I mean by that is we'll have a very limited number of words to which a dog's brainwaves can be translated to since we aren't able to understand them beyond their basic instincts of food, survival, fear, affection towards their owner etc.

There is just no way to go past what we have already observed by their behavior since dogs can't talk or write.

I do wonder how animals think. Perhaps this resolution would also be the theoretical maximum?

>There is just no way to go past what we have already observed by their behavior since dogs can't talk or write.

There are many dogs that have been trained to press buttons corresponding to words, in the extreme case tens/hundreds of buttons/words, and they can even construct rudimentary sentences. It doesn't seem insane to me that we could perhaps do a very rudimentary version of this for dogs, given a large enough training set.

Some important ones like, "earthquake", "Seizure", etc...

Might be of use.

but that's imposing our language on them, when we should be understanding them

there's a movie about that default human hubris, it spoils it though

That's a great point.

The "vocabulary resolution being low" basically just means within our own limited context, it's low. But that doesn't mean it's a good measure. Heck, I'd say it isn't.

Does your dog want to converse with you or anyone?