I will use my studies on abductive intelligence in an eco-cognitive framework to demonstrate the concept of “locked and unlocked strategies” in deep learning systems, indicating different inference routines for creative results. Higher forms of creative abductive intelligence are involved in unlocked human cognition, whereas locked abductive strategies are characterized by weak hypothetical creative intelligence because of the absence of what I refer to as eco-cognitive openness and situatedness. The fundamental nature of the human brain as an open system that is continuously coupled with the environment - a so-called “open” or dissipative system - is the physical basis for this special type of “openness”. The brain's activity is the continuous attempt to achieve equilibrium with its environment, and this interaction can never be turned off without seriously harming the brain. It is impossible to imagine the brain lacking its physical essence, which is its openness. In the brain, ordering is the direct result of an “internal” open dynamical process of the system rather than being generated from the outside, as I have described in my latest book Eco-Cognitive Computationalism (2022), “computational domestication of ignorant entities”.