(Playing devil's advocate) Once you're dead, there's no way you can feel good about sapient life existing. So if I toss a coin 1 second after your death and push the red button causing a nuclear apocalypse iff it comes up heads, you won't be able to feel sorrow in that case. You can certainly be sad before you die about me throwing the coin (if you know I'll do that), but once you're dead, there's just no way you could be happy or sad about anything.
So what you're saying is, one can't get warm fuzzies of any kind from anything unexpected happening after one's death, right? I agree with this. But consider expected fuzzies: Until one's death it's certainly possible to influence the world, changing its expected state, and get warm fuzzies from that expected value before one's death.
If we're talking utilons, not warm fuzzies, I wonder what it even means to "feel" utilons. My utility function is simply a mapping from the state of the world to the set of real numbers, and maximizing it means doing...
More than once, I've had a conversation roughly similar to the following:
Me: "I want to live forever, of course; but even if I don't, I'd still like for some sort of sapience to keep on living."
Someone else: "Yeah, so? You'll be dead, so how/why should you care?"
I've tried describing how it's the me-of-the-present who's caring about which sort of future comes to pass, but I haven't been able to do so in a way that doesn't fall flat. Might you have any thoughts on how to better frame this idea?