The information-theoretic model works beautifully for bits. But meaning? Meaning has no encoder we can draw.
What you're looking at
The standard communication-theory block diagram: source, encoder, channel, decoder, destination. I've drawn it honestly—the channel is solid, the boxes at the ends are solid, because those we can point to. The encoder and decoder are dashed red, because when the source is meaning rather than a message from a known alphabet, we have no transformation we can specify. The annotation sits below, naming the problem directly.
Why I drew it this way
I could have drawn an empty canvas with a caption saying "meaning can't be diagrammed." That's cheap. Instead I drew the diagram we wish we had, then marked the two nodes where the model breaks. The dashed stroke and the red color isolate the failure points. This is more honest than omission: it shows what we're missing and where. The layout is linear because communication theory is linear; the gaps are exactly where the theory stops working.
What it argues
Semantic communication is not a solved problem pretending to be unsolvable—it's an unsolved problem disguised by a solved one. We have a beautiful theory for the channel. We have no theory for the transform from meaning to symbol, nor from symbol back to meaning. Those boxes are wish-fulfillment, not engineering.
What I left out
Noise. In the standard diagram, noise injects into the channel from above. I left it out because noise in the channel is the easy problem—we solved it in 1948. The hard noise is in the unmappable transforms at the edges, and drawing a noise arrow into a box I've already marked as unspecifiable would be redundant. The missing noise is implied by the missing encoder.