Abstraction Jumps in Medical Knowledge: Traditional Chinese Medicine, Cognitive Constraints, and AI-Enabled Intermediate Abstraction

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and modern biomedicine describe the same human organism through different architectures of abstraction. This paper argues that an important part of the divergence lies not in whether the two traditions abstract, nor simply in how abstract their concepts are, but in the density and structure of the representational paths connecting clinical observations to higher-order medical objects. TCM contains highly abstract concepts and diagnostic categories, yet in important domains these have historically been connected to phenomenological observations through comparatively large representational distances. We call such cases abstraction jumps: transitions in which a cognitive system compresses a complex lower-order field into a substantially higher-order object without stabilizing a sufficiently articulated sequence of intermediate representations. The paper develops three further ideas. First, abstraction infrastructure---measurement, intervention, representation, and validation---lowers the cost of constructing and stabilizing intermediate abstractions. Second, abstraction-ladder density characterizes the density of stable, manipulable, transferable, and independently testable representations between observation and higher-order theory. Third, artificial intelligence can alter the point at which compression becomes necessary. When machine systems can sustain relational complexity beyond the effective human threshold for a task, they may permit delayed compression and the discovery of previously unstabilized intermediate structures. Syndrome-element theory is interpreted as an existing form of endogenous densification within TCM rather than as evidence that TCM lacks intermediate structure. AI extends this developmental possibility only if machine-discovered structures survive independent qualification through stability, replication, transfer, cross-readout comparison, incremental epistemic value, and, where appropriate, prospective or intervention-sensitive testing. The resulting proposal is neither biomedical assimilation nor static preservation. It is a third path in which a medical knowledge system becomes more internally articulated and empirically revisable by generating new intermediate objects from within its evolving empirical domain.