Jaegwon Kim, in his article on ‘Supervenience’ argued that there is a striking similarity between emergence and supervenience. According to Kim, “higher-level properties notably consciousness and other mental properties, emerge when, and only when, an appropriate set of lower-level (basal conditions) are present, and this means that the occurrence of the higher properties is determined by, and dependent on, the instantiation of appropriate lower-level properties and relations. In spite of this, emergent properties were held to be ‘genuinely novel’ characteristically irreducible to the lower level processes from which they emerge.”⁵  Then, the concept of emergence combines the three components of supervenience delineated above, namely, property covariance, dependence, and non-reducibility. Thus, emergentism can be regarded as the first systematic formulation of non-reductive physicalism.

This thesis makes the mental life supervenient on its physical background. That is to say, according to this thesis, the mental states are not reducible to but are supervenient on the physical states in such a way that whatever changes take place in the physical states must make a difference to the mental states well. No two things could differ in a mental respect unless they differed in some physical respect, that is, imperceptibility with respect to physical properties entails indiscerniblity with respect to mental properties. That is the core idea of mind-body supervenience.