Dying without eating cake surely has a utility. I mean, suppose I know I'm going to die tomorrow. I still assign different utilities to different ways I could spend today, I don't say the utility of today is null in all cases.
Or are you saying that it's possible to have a silly utility function that doesn't assign any value to eating the cake before dying compared to not eating the cake and then dying at the same time? Sure, but that utility function is silly.
Okay, since I'm one year wiser now, here is a New and improved utility formalization
1) Torture human, and then wipe their memory of the event.
2) Pleasure human, and then wipe their memory of the event.
3) Torture human, and then do not wipe their memory of the event.
4) Pleasure human, and do not wipe their memory of the event.
Rank these in terms of preference from best to work. My rank is 4, 2, 1, 3. You must share my preference ranking for this to work.
You must also accept the following proposition: Death is roughly analogous to a memory wipe.
In January, ...
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: