You are addressing half of what I am describing. Your clarifying that by reducing it to the clinical “drive/affect” makes that clear.
The “other” part is the embedded judgement. This is what is missing from current AI attempts like deep learning and symbolic reasoning systems. The common sense that everyone points to as the failing of deep learning.
Yes, your memory contains patterns and transition of patterns. But there is more. In the intersection between cortex and the sub-cortical command and control center is the vital HC/EC complex. This is where your feelings intersect with your experience. In this encoding center the output of your limbic system - your feelings about an experience - is combined with the what and where of the experience. EVERYTHING that you experience! This blending of experience and how you feel about the outcome of the buffered experience is running 24/7. Everything you experience gets a grade. It is not just good or bad, emotion has multiple dimensions. During recall and mental operations this coloring has weight in your deliberations.
In effect, the judgement is built right into the memory. The recall of an object brings the judgement right with it - there does not have to be any logical reasoning from first principles. The combination of objects in mental manipulation has this weighing built in so you tend to make good judgement without any reasoning at all.
I get that some people think that the brain is like a symbolic computer, working along the lines proposed by Gary Marcus. I say that building the logic of good and bad in the coding fed to the network is how the brain does it with connectionism so I side with Yoshua Bengio!
It’s not just a symbolic house, it’s (pattern & relationship & value weighting) bricks too!