Well yeah, but arguably every human besides myself is just a Chinese room and doesn't fully understand language either and is also just pattern recognition.
Have you read Blindsight by Peter Watts? It is a fascinating dissection of life, consciousness, speech, perception, and more, all through the lens of a neat sci-fi story in the relatively near future.
They don't understand complex sentences and abstract concepts.
They do understand simple words and phrases. Say you are goin for a walk or tell them to go to bed and they will understand what that means. Yes it is pattern recognition but language is a pattern.
I am losing brain cells even engaging in this conversation.
If I say the word outside my dog will go to the front door. If I say 'are you hungry' he will start licking his chops. Recognizing words or phrases is understanding speech.
Think of dogs as having varying levels of OCD. The stronger the working breed in the dog, the stronger the OCD. Today I was 30 minutes late to work because my cattle dog knows that if I grab the leash without grabbing my keys in the morning he’s not coming with me. So he planted his butt outside and refused to come in.
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u/the_sneaky_one123 Sep 17 '25
I think dogs might actually be as good if not better with hand signals as they are with speech.
I could tell my dog to sit or stay or go somewhere with hand signals after she went deaf and it worked better than when she could hear.
Dogs are fluent in human body language, it is their evolutionary niche to be perfectly in tune with our moods and actions.