Toy Story 3 showed that Mr. Potato Head’s life is apparently contained in the sum of his detachable parts, rather than the potato body.
So, let’s suppose that Mr. Potato Head’s eye, for example, was lost, and replaced by a new one. Would this new eye then become a part of Mr. P’s “identity,” or would we have a case of split personality, in which the new eye is basically that of a different Potato Head?
If the former, what if you replaced each of the detachable parts, one at a time? Is it still the same Potato Head afterwards?
If the latter, how would this split personality work? Could the eye have a life of its own?
Not really; there’s a scene in the trailers [spoil]where Mr and Mrs’ parts are swapped at random (probably by the Sunnyside workers who were cleaning up) and Mr’s mouth does the talking and it’s him (honey- the moustache!) [/spoil]-Omar
I think the best example of this is after the daycare playtime, when Mr. and Mrs. Potato head’s parts are in each other and they’re still controlling them
Mhm, that’s a good point, but I was thinking about it a bit more deeply - suppose just a single part (ie. an eye) was replaced by another eye, manufactured specifically as a replacement, identical to the one that was lost (not a Mrs Potato Head eye!).
So, would Mr. Potato Head now have a split personality? If so, how can the eye have its own personality?
This reminds me of the ‘Ship of Theseus’ fable. I actually first discovered it while reading critical theory on Wall-E.
The story is a ship which, bit by bit, is replaced as things wear out or are damaged. Once everything has been replaced, is the ship still the same ship it was to begin with? Would Mr Potato Head still be Mr Potato Head if we replaced all his parts?
