Would recommend reading The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning by Daniel Bor for a lot of ideas strongly connected to recent research. My interpretation of this is the mind ends up being a story processing machine that builds stories about what has happened and is happening and constructs and compares stories about what might happen or be made to happen. Of course it is difficult to summarize a whole book rich with references in a sentence, but the model seems arguably more simple and well established than what you are currently putting forward.

Very much looking forward to seeing continuing progress in all this.