Differential Experience Architecture: Deformation Laws of Counterfactual Answerability in Controlled Virtual Worlds

Virtual-reality evaluation usually asks whether an environment is present, usable, affective, successful, or causally effective. A different question is whether the organization of an experience can be measured through the way its reachable consequences deform. Building on Experience Architecture, this paper introduces Differential Experience Architecture (DEA), a local deformation framework for counterfactual Answerability across six mutually constrained conditions: Difference, Availability, Orientation, Integration, Temporality, and Answerability. For smooth probabilistic response fields, we show that the first non-vanishing local divergence from a baseline is quadratic and induces an Answerability Susceptibility Matrix whose diagonal entries measure condition-specific sensitivity and whose mixed entries measure local second-order nonseparability. We give explicit separability and falsification criteria, a reproducible estimation algorithm, and a controlled validation protocol. Computational experiments on controlled synthetic architectures show that the separable system yields essentially zero interaction, the coupled system yields an interaction fraction of 0.4762, and coupling ablation returns the interaction to zero. On held-out combined perturbations, the full susceptibility model reduces RMSE from 1.108 × 10⁻³ to 1.891 × 10⁻⁴, an 82.94% improvement over the diagonal model. These results establish computational consistency, not human-subject validity. Controlled virtual worlds are proposed as the experimental realization for future empirical estimation of DEA geometry.