Interdisciplinary research provides inspirations and insights on how a variety of disciplines can contribute to the formulation of an alternative path to artificial cognition systems. It is suggested how results from ethology, evolutionary theory, and epistemology can be condensed into four boundary conditions. They lead to the outline of an architecture for genuine cognitive systems, which seeks to overcome traditional problems known from artificial intelligence research. Two major points are stressed: (a) The maintenance of explanatory power by favoring an advanced rule-based system rather than neuronal systems, and (b) the organizational closure of the cognitive apparatus, which has far-reaching implications for the creation of meaningful agents.