If I could assume that consciousness and free will are emergent properties, I would. The problem is that a) it would be a non-trivial assumption (nothing in what we have observed in science so far makes it likelier than the alternatives), and b) it would lead to certain contradictions that I can't quite resolve.

Your observation about determinism being a process is correct, in that an observer in the future might see the fact that I am typing this response as causally-determined, but an observer in the present might see it as an unfolding process in which he is unable to predict the outcome. But that is just a change in observation points; a different frame of reference. The key question remains the same in both frames of reference - did I CHOOSE to type this response to you, or was my action caused by past events in a way that was inevitable?

If you believe that I chose to respond to your post, I think you might find this belief difficult to reconcile with the assumption that the mind is an emergent property of matter -- as far as I can tell, there in no mechanism by which an emergent property of matter can have choice regarding what happens to it next.

And so you get this paradox, that people like Sam Harris, who choose to devote their life to preaching a particular set of beliefs, must also believe that choice does not exist and free will is an illusion -- even as they observe it in their own choices.