The brain is capable of recursion, regression in upon itself, a re-entrant bootstrapping routine that loads another level of something we term “objectivity”, we "map" this to itself. We objectivise the world by projecting a memory, an image of some part of the external into our internal information "store".

Although we don't well understand how our biochemical brains actually do this, we do understand information, and how it behaves.

and people believe that the brain and the mind are two separate entities

The only difference between two minds is what a group can decide they both know about something. Each individual brain is in that sense a tool, which different individuals use differently, but we all expend energy doing it. In that sense, the information in a mind (a brain) is the result of all that that mind has seen, touched, tasted, or heard in a lifetime.

 

A subset of this experience (knowledge) becomes a useful external abstract only when other observers (a group) decides that it is rational, and forms a logical adjunct, and can become part of the group knowledge. Individual knowledge is unstable, in that sense, and group knowledge is the stable form, symbolic (external) or otherwise. This is why equating information with a message is an incomplete description of it. A message only becomes information when we have expended further energy (on it). Equating it with its representation is incorrect.