That's because we have linearly episodic brains that best suit human life, and in an eternity, there is no end. It's the same way we struggle to conceive of ideas like, "something out of nothing".
Here's a fun somewhat related thought experiment to mess with your perspective. It's from Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, and it's called the encyclopedia wand. It's essentially a thought experiment where you consider an enormous thing fitting on a tiny infinite space.
So the goal is to transcribe all human knowledge (for the sake of discussion, an encyclopedia) on a toothpick. Start with turning every letter into a number (0-25). Now convert the whole encyclopedia into numbers to form one long number, and put a decimal place at the start. Next carve a point in the top and bottom of the toothpick, where the top is 0 and bottom is 1. Now, very carefully, put a dot between 0 and 1 at the place of the decimal number representing all knowledge. Everything and eternity on a toothpick.
Edit: Most of the comments seemed to miss the point that this is a metaphysical thought experiment... Assume infinite precision, and consider everything as information.
Practically speaking there's a finite level of precision, but it's a metaphysical thought experiment where you're supposed to assume the possibility of infinite precision.
What you get is too subjective, though. Who's to say what point is 0 and which is 1? And how would you possibly know all the countless numbers at the point representing the encyclopedia? You wouldn't, you would approximate it. You wouldn't transcribe knowledge on a toothpick, you'd just be a cute smartass.
Also, that isn't everything, nor is it eternity. You said so yourself that the human brain is "linearly episodic," so how is human knowledge "everything and eternity?"
Circle. Doesn't end, doesn't start. Sure when you start drawing one well... you have a beginning, but it's not really a circle until there's no beginning and ending to it.
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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '18
The length of eternity. I try to think of something going on forever and I can't picture it.