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 that action out of all possible actions that maximizes the expected value of that function. My utility function can be more or less arbitrary, it's just saying which actions I'll take given that I have a choice.
Saying I care about sapient beings conquering the galaxy after my demise is merely saying that I will, while I can, choose those actions that augment the chance of sapient beings conquering the galaxy, nothing else. While I can't feel happy about accomplishing this after my death, it still makes sense to say that while I lived, I cared for this future in which I couldn't participate, by any sensible meaning of the verb "to care".
(playing devil's advocate) But you're dead by then! Does anything even matter if you can't experience it anymore?
Now, I find myself in a peculiar situation: I fully understand and accept the argument I made in the parent to this post, but somehow, a feeling prevails that this line of reasoning is unacceptable. It probably stems from my instincts which scream at me that death is bad, and from my brain not being able to imagine its nonexistence from the inside view.
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?