This discussion has made me feel I don't understand what "utilon" really means. Hedons are easy: clearly happiness and pleasure exist, so we can try to measure them. But what are utilons?

• "Whatever we maximize"? But we're not rational, quite inefficient, and whatever we actually maximize as we are today probably includes a lot of pain and failures and isn't something we consciously want.

• "Whatever we self-report as maximizing"? Most of the time this is very different from what we actually try to maximize in practice, because self-reporting is signaling. And for a lot of people it includes plans or goals that, when achieved, are likely (or even intended) to change their top-level goals drastically.

• "If we are asked to choose between two futures, and we prefer one, that one is said to be of higher utility." That's a definition, yes, but it doesn't really prove that the collection-of-preferred-universes can be described any more easily than the real decision function of which utilons are supposed to be a simplification. For instance, what if by minor and apparently irrelevant changes in the present, I can heavily influence all of people's preferences for the future?

Also a note on the post:

Akrasia is what happens when we maximize our hedons at the expense of our utilons.

That definition feels too broad to me. Typically akrasia has two further atttributes:

• Improper time discounting: we don't spend an hour a day exercising even though we believe it would make us lose weight, with a huge hedonic payoff if you maximize hedons over a time horizon of a year.

• Feeling so bad due to not doing the necessary task that we don't really enjoy ourselves no matter what we do instead (and frequently leading to doing nothing for long periods of time). Hedonically, even doing the homework usually feels a lot better (after the first ten minutes) than putting it off, and we know this from experience - but we just can't get started!