Is there something teleological about the half-life of an isotope?
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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I would think of isotopic composition as more of a quality of a thing than as a thing itself with a purpose.
But that same decay is the source of an interesting philosophical problem that I'm seriously trying to address. To give you a sense of that problem, I will first tell a story: before quantum theory was formulated, some folks said there's no need for God because we live in a deterministic universe, where every physical event is determined entirely by previous physical events. After quantum theory became known some folks (probably the same folks) said there's no need to posit God because, if we look at radioactive decay, we find events that have no cause.
An alternative to these two positions is to say that there are causes that are NOT deterministic. As long as physics takes math as its paradigm of knowledge, then such a proposal will seem ludicrous, for causes, to be intelligible, must exhibit necessity. If an event is not necessitated, then it's uncaused.
The alternative position would be that radioactive decay has some kind of cause, but it's not the type that guarantees that the event will happen here and now.
That description overlaps somewhat with a final cause: it's almost as if atoms were trying to decay and eventually do so.
So, in response to your question, I'm talking about the eventual decay rather than the initial composition. But yes, I am not sure that it makes sense to talk about purposes here. The truth is that, for Aristotle, it might not make sense, when considering non-living things, to talk about the purpose of this or that part. Perhaps he is principally committed to regarding nature as a whole as teleological: parts (such as particles) are telic only in a secondary manner.