blind as a bat

We say someone is [as blind as a bat] to say they have very poor eyesight:

Furthermore, poor eyesight could refer to someone who is inattentive, unobservant or has no interest in their immediate surrounding, when perhaps they should.

Blind as a Bat: A Case of Mind vs. Body:

Almost 40 years before the publication of “Mind and Cosmos,” the philosopher Thomas Nagel laid out the difficulties scientists face in trying to explain how the human brain gives rise to consciousness. His essay, as influential as any in the philosophy of mind, is called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

By emitting “rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks” and comparing them with the echoes, Dr. Nagel wrote, bats create a finely detailed, three-dimensional mental map of their world. But we humans are fundamentally incapable of imagining — and understanding — the animal’s inner life. Subjective experience, he concluded, is irreducible to physical terms. And so even the most precise theory of the brain can never fully account for the existence of mental phenomenon.

[The New York Times | 21.07.14 | LINK]

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