Ladies and Gentlemen,
the jubilee 10th edition of the Silesian Science Festival Katowice is coming up! Once again, we will meet at the International Congress Centre in Katowice, this time on 5-7 December 2026. Each year, we look for an issue that is even more attractive than the last – one that provokes, engages, evokes emotion, not just a desire to learn. As the leading theme of the 10th edition of the Silesian Science Festival Katowice 2026 we have chosen
INTELLIGENCES
A Polyphony of Minds1
For centuries, intelligence was the mirror of human reason alone; an extraordinary emanation of humanity's greatest enigma: our consciousness. Education, perfected over centuries, has been and remains the training ground for human intelligence. Its staggering creations—chief among them science, art, and technology—affirmed our belief in human exceptionalism and our right to dominion over nature. Today, we see this mirror shattering into multiple INTELLIGENCES, which are no longer solely the domain of humanity.
Behold, a new steward of knowledge has emerged: the learning machine, wielding artificial intelligence. It is the latest iteration of the Golem, one we had dreamt of long before the first servers sparked to life. Today, algorithms write poetry, diagnose diseases, and solve equations, before which our biological cognitive apparatus stands helpless. On the other hand, science is discovering, with an almost Franciscan humility, the formidable intelligence of nature. The forest is no longer a collection of isolated trunks, a chaotic tangle of plants and fungi, but a rationally functioning network interconnected by information and cooperation. The animals that inhabit it reveal cognitive competencies, a morality of their own, and a language we are only just learning to comprehend. And who knows—perhaps artificial intelligence will learn it faster.
Reason is not the sole seat of human intelligence; our emotions and sensory perceptions also participate in the most complex intellectual operations. Let us dare to conceive of and investigate an intelligence that belongs not to the individual, but to a collective—woven together by a network of enigmatic connections among many individuals, intertwined by information and emotion. The intelligent ocean is no longer merely the literary vision of Stanisław Lem, but a serious scientific hypothesis about a thinking and acting intelligent system.
We can no longer speak of intelligence in the singular. Just how vastly it must be multiplied, we shall discover in December 2026.
Let us meet for the tenth time to collectively marvel at and be astounded by the creations of human and non-human intelligences.
1 We created and translated this section together using Gemini asked to describe the guiding idea of the 10th edition of ŚFN in the style of Professor Ryszard Koziołek.
We encourage you to submit your proposals for the programme of the 10th ŚFN Katowice. More information and an application form can be found on the website.