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I don't have precise answer to your question, but have some question which can prehaps be useful in answering it.
Namely: what about space? I mean, you talk here about time, something along the lines of "We can imagine our Universe as a solid eternal block of spacetime, so why do I experiencing present moment instead of all moments at once?" But what about "We can imagine our universe as a solid eternal block of spacetime, so why I am experiencing 'here' locality instead of all places at once?". I think these are very similar questions.
We can go even further and ask "We can imagine Multiverse of self-consistent mathematical objects (among which is, of course, our Universe) as one eternal blob, so why do we experience present, local moment instead of everything existent?".
It seems, the key to confusion here is that we imagining ourself as an outside observer of arbitrary high level and then we ask "why our experience difers from experience of such an observer". But this is exactly because we are not this observer. What we are is a different question, of course. I personally havn't yet found a satisfactory answer to the hard problem of consciousness, but it seems this specific in experience (space/time locality) tells us about something about which consciousness is certainly not.
Yeah, but answer a question "why should agent care about 'preparing'?" Then any answer you give will yield "why this?" ad infinitum. So this chain of "whys" cannot be stopped unless you specify some terminal point. And the moment you do specify such a point, you introduce an "ought" statement.
I mean, you suppose that agent should care about possibly caring in the future, but this itself constitutes an 'ought' statement.
But isn't "don't lose a lot", for example is a goal by itself?
If I understand you right, basically, you say that once we postulate consciousness as some basic, irreducible building block of reality, confusion related to consciousness will evaporate. Maybe it will help partially, but I think it will not solve problem completely. Why? Let's say that consciousness is some terminal node in our world-model, this still leaves the question "What systems in word are conscious?". And I guess that current hypotheses for answer to this question are rather confusing. We didn't have same level of confusion with other models of basic building blocks. For example, with atoms we thought "yup, everything is an atom, to build this rock we need these atoms and for the cat -- other", then with quantum configurations we think "OK, universe is one gigantic configuration, the rock is this factor and this cat is other" etc and it doesn't seem very unintuitive (even if the process of producing these factors is hard, it is know 'in principle'), but with consciousness we don't know (even in principle!) how to measure of consciousness in any particular system and that's, IMHO, the important difference.