I see consciousness as a way to describe the reinforcement learning process for an agent in an environment. Thus I try to see if a universe consciousness would have the characteristics of an RL agent.

What would such a conscious universe be conscious of? Would it need to feed, mate, learn and defend itself? If there is no utility, no purpose, then why would it be conscious?

At least in biological life, there is an internal purpose - that is - to live and self reproduce. The consciousness of the universe would not have such needs, and with their loss, it would lose all that evolution achieved.