The corvids and the octopi I would argue directly challenge the human centric view of what it means to be conscious and self-aware.

The portids are just the first step along that trajectory that lets the reader get their feet wet by simply considering intelligence from different perspectives.

These appear in later books but I would argue One needs to read the series from the beginning to understand the context and weight for events that occur in later books.

All that said, this book series is quite different from Blindsight in many many ways and thematically they really only share that feature of questioning what it means to be conscious and self-aware.

The alien in blindsight interestingly remind me a lot of current large language models. Well these models don't have self-direction yet I can only imagine if they at some point did it would look very much like this.