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An integrative level is a pattern of organization emerging on pre-existing phenomena of a lower level. Typical examples include life emerging out of non-living substances, and consciousness emerging out of the nervous system or social institutions emerging out of individual people interacting.

As components combine to produce larger functional wholes in hierarchical series, new properties emerge, and one cannot explain all of the properties at one level from an understanding of the components at the level below. The idea of integrative levels is central to the theory of emergence as integrative levels can be understood as the product of the process of emergence having played out to generate two or more qualitatively different levels of organization.