"If the faculty of self-consciousness is to apprehend what lies in the mind, it must affect that and can in this way alone produce an intuition of self."

-Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

Engaging in existential thought entails the understanding of the inner workings of one's own subjectivity. Existentialism is the discipline that consists of the principles of the aforementioned understanding. The existential faculty is as fundamental to the human psyche as the faculties of spatial, verbal and quantitative reasoning. Given its fundamentality, it is unsurprising that psychologists have categorized it as an intelligence. But is it an intelligence? What exactly is the existential faculty? What is the nature of existential thought?

Computers are like brains; especially computers that function on neural networks. Some computers learn, understand concepts, and reason based on such understanding. One might go as far as to say that these computers are aware of those concepts and conclusions. I see no reason why they aren't. But are they aware of themselves? No. If they were, all there conceptions and computations could still be valid. They would still have the same level of "intelligence" that they use to reason quantitatively, spatially, and conceivably even verbally. So what would be different about them?

Well, to answer this question, we must look at what self-awareness actually entails. Self-awareness is the awareness of the operation of cognition in general. This revelation means that the concept of awareness is twofold. We can apply the term "awareness" to our mind's reception of impressions, or representations. We can also apply the term "awareness", or, more specifically, "self-awareness", to the awareness not of anything in particular, but to the awareness of that which operates the awareness of all the particular cognitions, in other words, the self. Since the self (that which operates all particular cognitions) cannot be stripped from the self-awareness, because obviously without that which operates all particular cognitions there is nothing the mind can be aware of, whether it be in the form of self-awareness or the awareness merely of particular things, the self is part of the self-awareness.

Since everything cognized in the self-awareness is necessarily tied to the self-awareness, everything cognized in the self-awareness is necessarily tied to the self, which means that in a self-aware being everything that consists of cognitive phenomena carries with it an impression that the self necessarily imposes on it, because the self is united with the self-awareness. In other words, conceptions don't just impress upon the self-awareness abstract ideas, because abstract ideas are not really physical entities; every cognition is a feeling, and those sensations are impressed upon the self-awareness. The study of the principles and ideas that are derived from these impressions is existentialism.