You seem to have made a serious effort to get Damasio to say things he doesn’t say, and to alter the things he does say so that they mean what you want them to. Unfortunately, I don’t find the results convincing.

“The brain creates the self and then the self arranges or negotiates our experience of the mind?” This has to do with how he defines the words “self” (the organiser of mentality, in the brain stem) and “consciousness” (the contents of the mind, largely in the neocortex). You aren’t using the words the way he does. If you do, the paradox goes away.

“Disregarding such insights, Damasio wants to find a job for the conscious self” – no, that’s a fundamental mistake. He is talking about the existence of the self, but is not trying to find a “job” for it (in the sense that it has been uniquely selected by evolution). The self is what it is. The point is, it exists. To think of it as a separate entity from the consciousness, like a plug & play module, is a mistake. It is an outcome of the way the brain evolved, but it is a real, extant outcome. The point is, the path of evolution the brain followed built in the “self” right from the beginning, as an aspect of brain architecture, not a functional module. When you talk about the “space inside a building” you don’t talk about the “job” of the space, or ask what would happen if you “removed it”. You don’t think about the space inside a building in that way. But it doesn’t mean the space isn’t real, or that it doesn’t influence the way the building is used. Damasio’s talk about the things the self does is metaphorical and descriptive, not intending to identify points of natural selection for the “self” as a module. In fact, this is a better way to think about it than Churchlands, which is still rooted in the idea of the self as a unique module, albeit a “utility”.

Similarly, the arguments about decisions being made before the contents enter consciousness is a misunderstanding of consciousness and decision making. Decisions are made by “the brain” which includes all the subconscious processes. If you pull your hand away from a hot stove, you would say “I took my hand away” even though you know this is a spinal reflex which doesn’t get anywhere near the CNS. It’s still “you” though. Your consciousness is a high level function so there is a time delay before decisions enter consciousness. In that sense “consciousness” doesn’t decide ANYTHING. But your consciousness isn’t a sort of dissect-able bit of your brain that you could just cut out, to see if everything goes on as normal. ALL of your brain is “You”, not just this particular function. And if ALL of your brain makes decisions, well, no surprise! So Damasio’s “conscious deliberation” refers to a process involving the consciousness, over time, but one which involves all of the brain as well. The fact that the subconscious (ie “those functions not directly accessible to the consciousness”) is centrally involved in decisions is NOT an argument for or against free will unless you a priori exclude all of the brain from decision making EXCEPT for that aspect of brain function that we call “consciousness”. I think the biggest problem with free will is that it’s poorly defined! We still debate it as a sort of medieval idea, when in fact it needs to be redefined in modern terms.