Page "Supervenience" Paragraph 1

In philosophy, supervenience is an ontological relation that is used to describe cases where ( roughly speaking ) the lower-level properties of a system determine its higher level properties.

Many people believe that the world is structured in to a kind of hierarchy of properties, where the higher level properties supervene on the lower level properties.

According to this type of view, social properties supervene on psychological properties, psychological properties supervene on biological properties, biological properties supervene on chemical properties, etc.

That is, the chemical properties of the world determine a distribution of biological properties, those biological properties determine a distribution of psychological properties, and so forth.