But if you're keeping up with the latest cognitive neuroscience, you might not be quite so worried. It turns out that preferences are encoded cardinally after all, and they do have a natural unit: action potentials per second. With cardinally encoded preferences, we can develop a utility function that represents our preferences and adheres to the common-sense criteria listed above.

I wonder whether this is actually true. The brain is such a complex system that the claims in your neuroscience post, while plausible, also sound like they might be dangerous oversimplifications.

Could you write a paper about this for some peer-reviewed journal? This is a claim that I'd really, really, really want to subject to the full examination of the whole academic world to see whether it checks out in the end. (Also, it seems like a relatively easy way to get an insane number of citations, if the claim gets taken seriously by economists.)