The film's own framing gestures at old company: it cuts Bostrom's simulation argument against Plato's cave, Descartes' deceiving demon and, in its own words, Hindu accounts of nested dream-worlds. Scholars who work on this material independently draw two comparisons further than the film goes, and both are worth stating precisely, as comparisons others have made, rather than as anything this atlas asserts on its own account.
Ian Huyett's 2024 article in the peer-reviewed journal Sophia argues that Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, taken seriously, reproduces the shape of Gnostic cosmology: a remote, true Godhead and a flawed, lesser demiurge who fashions the world we take for real, with a higher, truer order lying outside it and beyond our unaided reach. That cosmological structure is well attested in Gnostic scholarship generally, and Huyett's point is that simulation theory relocates the same architecture into computation rather than myth, which is a genuine parallel rather than a loose one.
Writer Rizwan Virk makes a comparable case for Hindu and Buddhist maya, the teaching that the perceived world is real enough to act in, yet has no independent standing of its own. But Advaita philosophers would resist the equation on their own terms: simulation theory keeps a builder and a built thing as two separate levels, a program and its programmer, where Advaita collapses that distinction entirely, since consciousness alone is real and the world is neither a lie nor a second thing running on it. The parallel is real enough that scholars keep drawing it. It is not, on either side's own terms, an identity.