Why is there something rather than everything?
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a famous question in philosophy and metaphysics that is very difficult to answer because it’s hard to imagine how nothing could yield something. An alternative approach to understanding the existence of something is to ask, “Why is there something rather than everything?”
This question has several advantages as compared to the original. The first is that we understand the existence of everything relatively well. Everything can be understood in terms of logical contradiction. By the principle of explosion, logical contradiction is sufficient to generate everything. So a logically inconsistent reality has everything in it (including having nothing—it’s contradiction, after all). It is intuitive that everything would be the default state of things because everything is what you get when there are no constraints on being.
Logical contradiction may be the same thing as economic abundance, in which case we can also understand everything in economic terms: everything is what happens in the absence of scarcity. Thus, we can potentially bring in tools from math and economics to bear on the question of why is there something, which is advantageous.
A second advantage is that it is more intuitive as to how everything might becoming something. Amid the contradictions that are present in everything (e.g., an object that both exists and does not exist) are subcollections of things that are logically consistent with each other. “Something” could be any of these logically consistent subcollections. So everything could be turned into something by cutting away contradictory portions of reality until you are left with a logically consistent something rather than a contradictory everything, like a sculptor turning a block of stone into a statue by carving it. It is much more intuitive to imagine carving a statue out of a block of stone (something from everything) than it is to imagine summoning a statue from the void (something from nothing).
Alternatively, everything may become something from an observer standpoint. Perhaps there are paths of logical consistency that form tracks on an everything surface. From the perspective of an observer traveling on one of these paths, they will see something instead of everything because reality will look logically consistent or scarce to them. In this possibility, nothing is cut away, but the observers on one of these paths don’t have the competency to induce contradictions from reality.
The question of why is there something instead of everything is interesting because of the relationship between contradiction and externality. Analyzing how everything becomes something may help to solve the problem of externality.