What's been a very interesting deep dive over the past few years is that there was almost a simulation theory like rethinking of these ideas attributed to Jesus of all people in the first to fourth centuries CE.
Part of the debate on these ideas in antiquity that's often left out of discussions were the naturalists, specifically the Epicureans.
Around 50 years before Jesus was born, Lucretius wrote De Rerum Natura, swapping the Greek word for indivisible ('atomos') with the Latin word for seed. And in that work, explicitly describing randomly scattered seeds plus survival of the fittest as the origin of life, even describing failed biological reproduction as "seed falling by the wayside of a path."
So around the first century there's this ongoing pre-Neoplatonist debate between whether we are some physical incarnation of a pre-existing 'form' like Plato said (and connected to Judaism's dual creation of man in Genesis such as in Philio) and the idea that there was no design but simply randomness and survival to reproduce.
An important nuance to Plato's ideas is in Book 10 of The Republic in the bed analogy, where he lays out the idea of a spiritual 'form' of a bed, then the physical bed, and then the 'image' of the physical bed as rendered by an artist (which he considered least valuable of all).
Well this later apocryphal sect of Christianity is all about rejecting the Epicurean surety of final death by building on their own recurrence thinking using Plato's ideas - not of 'forms' (as the Neoplatonist influences on later developments in Gnosticism circle back to), but specifically on 'images.'
The later Naassenes allegedly described their belief of an original spontaneous being bringing forth a creator of a non-physical copy of a physical original (with the original likened to a spontaneous tumor). They seemed to regard the first spontaneous being as 'Man'/'Adam' (which in Hebrew/Aramaic can mean the proper named individual or more generally humankind).
So you have this rather wild reworking of Plato and Epicurus's ideas into a combined picture where naturalist physical origins can eventually result in non-physical recreation as enacted by a creator itself brought forth by an original mankind.
What's particularly wild is their thinking that the proof for all this was in "motion and rest" and their claim that the ability to discover "an indivisible point as if from nothing" (how the Naassenes described their understanding of seeds in the mustard seed and sower parables) would not be possible in the physical.
It's a radically different set of beliefs from what modern Christianity is across the board. Nearly the complete opposite.
Very negative views of religious obligations and especially payment. Advocated self-discovery and being true to oneself. Saw salvation as a birthright entitlement. That being "born again" was literally being born as a baby into the non-physical copy of the original, not some symbolic ritual. Encouraged the drinking of words to become one with the author, not the consumption of blood and flesh.
Overall one of the most interesting things I've ever studied.