I think you are inventing new terms for belief with/without understanding or critical thought. If the only input you have is what you personally experience, you will have a limited set of things you can have views on. And even then almost anything presented to you will come with some bias or belief baked into it (even your own two eyes).

If someone makes a belief statement, and I critically evaluate the statement, understand what it means then I decide to agree with it I think it is only a little different than coming up with a belief yourself (though you will always be more intimately familiar with something you create on your own).

I wouldn't put too much importance into this whole leader/follower dynamic. Not everyone can be expected to have the breadth of experience and the time available to compose original beliefs on everything in the world. The best you can expect is critical thought and understanding instead of blindly following a belief (understanding vs rote learning). Otherwise, by simply reading my reply here, you are contaminating yourself with a 'synthetic' belief (if you happen to believe what I am saying) which you seem to attribute less worth to.

As long as you are always willing to continually re-asses your beliefs against your understanding of the world, I think you won't have to fear becoming a parrot.

I can't answer your "What is the meaning of our existence?" question.

However I can say that I broadly agree with you - just replace the 'emotions' with 'experience', and don't equate 'motivation' to 'meaning'. Humans are more than just their emotions and the experience of being human also includes things like thought, sensation, and instinct as well as emotions.

The sum of that human experience is basically the only thing that is real to us. You can choose to assign a meaning to that or not. Everything comes through the lens of that human experience - without it there is no perspective from which to interpret the universe. None of this has anything to do with a grand purpose though.

1. Presented
2. Accepted (or Rejected)
3. Processed
4. Agreed/Disagreed (Belief/Disbelief)

So perhaps more along the lines of willingness to process when talking about a concept?

Maybe this was already discussed in this thread - but why do people seem to think that free will and determinism are incompatible.

It is only the assumption that free will comes from outside of the natural universe which is incompatible with determinism. Who you are, your pattern still has agency and makes decisions its just that they are predictable to a perfect predictor, which is normative...