Some professionals take issue with this framing, but it's usually referred to in jargon-permitted settings as "controlled hallucinations".
We've clearly got inputs, outputs, and when working correctly, some signal processing going on in the middle.
But more like: the inputs, processing, and outputs have much more complicated relationships than this causal chain that you have described. Modern neuroscience and research into NCC have shown that the brain, obviously, is not so simple.