I still pick "later", despite not thinking I have quantum immortality
I dunno, your choice is walking in a duck-like manner. Of course, intuition pumps are tricky, and we're usually not consistent with respect to them. For example, if I asked you to lock yourself in that room for ten dollars per minute, you'd refuse. Perhaps some conceptual weirdness stems from the fact that in the thought experiment, there's no point at which you're "let out to find out if you're dead or not."
There may well be an inconsistency, but that particular example doesn't seem to exploit it yet...
U=aPresent+bFutureExpectations
agree, die
U1=aPresent+b*[Expected Future with me Dead]
agree, live
U2=present+b*[alive and $10 richer]
refuse
U3=present+b*[Expected Future with me Alive]
U3 > [.5U2 + .5U1] do not take the deal,
With the cake, however, ExpectedValueFromFutureCake = Null in the case that I am dead, which renders the entire utility function irrelevant. (within the system of the other comment)
Eat cake now (dead or alive) Ux = CakeRightNow + 0
Eat cake la...
Imagine that the universe is approximately as it appears to be (I know, this is a controversial proposition, but bear with me!). Further imagine that the many worlds interpretation of Quantum mechanics is true (I'm really moving out of Less Wrong's comfort zone here, aren't I?).
Now assume that our universe is in a situation of false vacuum - the universe is not in its lowest energy configuration. Somewhere, at some point, our universe may tunnel into true vacuum, resulting in a expanding bubble of destruction that will eat the entire universe at high speed, destroying all matter and life. In many worlds, such a collapse need not be terminal: life could go one on a branch of lower measure. In fact, anthropically, life will go on somewhere, no matter how unstable the false vacuum is.
So now assume that the false vacuum we're in is highly unstable - the measure of the branch in which our universe survives goes down by a factor of a trillion every second. We only exist because we're in the branch of measure a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of... all the way back to the Big Bang.
None of these assumptions make any difference to what we'd expect to see observationally: only a good enough theory can say that they're right or wrong. You may notice that this setup transforms the whole universe into a quantum suicide situation.
The question is, how do you go about maximising expected utility in this situation? I can think of a few different approaches: