New religious cult in rise?

[I_am_not_mafia]

Don't have time to watch it because I'm at work, but there's a paradox with emotions. You need irrational emotional biases in order to act rationally. This is called the framing problem. If you can't arbitrarily decide between two equal choices you'll end up thinking through a myriad of possibilities. The neurosurgeon Antonio Damasio describes a patient with emotional impairment acting like this in his book Descartes Error when the patient is given a choice of two different days for his next appointment.

Ironically emotions are actually quite rational, you just have to understand them in the right context. For example, in a committed relationship with a jealous partner, they may act seemingly irrationally to any hint of infidelity, but in evolutionary terms this would stop any partner from being tempted to be unfaithful and may help them stick around and help raise the child.

It's understood that cognition generally widens the range of choices available to an agent while emotions narrow them. You don't want to be considering how tasty the grass might be if you've just heard the squawk of a predator for example, you want to make fleeing your priority over everything else. Doing otherwise would be quite irrational.

Nonsense.

There exists brain based artificial intelligence, that exceeds human performance in cognitive tasks, absent emotion's necessitation: http://singularityhub.com/2015/11/11/exp...ng-cancer/

You're only calling it nonsense because it's outside of your limited experience, i.e. deep learning with simplistic models of neurons. Try reading the scientific literature sometime from neuroscientists researching emotions like Antonio Damasio, Joseph Ledoux, Jaak Panksepp, Jean Marc Fellous and Edmund Rolls. Add to that Artificial Intelligentsia such as Marvin Minsky, Dylan Evans, and the evolutionary biologist R.M. Nesse

These are just some of the main names, there are many other papers written about the functional role of emotions.